A onetime insider in Democratic fundraising circles says Kamala Harris told the party's wealthiest backers that Joe Biden would stay in the 2024 race, even as she quietly positioned herself to take his place.
Lindy Li, a former top fundraiser for both Biden and Harris who has since left the Democratic Party, laid out the accusation in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital. Li says Harris hosted calls with major donors in the weeks before Biden's July 21, 2024, withdrawal, projecting loyalty to the president while cultivating those same donors for her own potential candidacy.
Li pinpointed one call in particular, held, by her recollection, on or around July 19, 2024, just two days before Biden announced he would not seek reelection. On that call, Li says, Harris told some of the Democratic Party's biggest financial backers that Biden would not drop out and that she would stand with him "until the end."
Two days later, Biden was gone. And Harris moved fast.
Li did not hold back about what she witnessed. She described the entire sequence as a calculated performance:
"It was all charade. She was auditioning for Biden's endorsement, and the way that she did it was by imposing a fake rule on her staff to not talk about her ascending to the nomination."
That "fake rule," as Li characterized it, was a directive Harris allegedly placed on her own staff, barring any discussion of the possibility that she would rise to the top of the ticket. Li framed it as a deliberate show of loyalty designed to win Biden's trust and, eventually, his endorsement.
Li went further, describing what she saw firsthand on the donor calls:
"I was on the call; she would host calls with donors and pretend to support Biden and say there's no daylight between Biden and herself. All the while she was auditioning for those very donors."
The donors on those calls were not small-dollar contributors. Li described them as "some of the biggest donors in the party" and, elsewhere, "the wealthiest people in the country." No specific names or dollar figures have been disclosed.
Li says the reaction among donors after Biden's withdrawal was swift and bitter. Many of them, she recounted, had been told directly by Harris that Biden was staying in. When he didn't, they felt deceived, and they said as much to each other.
"A lot of us have group chats. And the immediate reaction is what an effing waste of time. What a charade, how fake. Like these are like the wealthiest people in the country saying that. They were very aware they were being lied to, that Biden was clearly not okay and to be told that he was okay when he was clearly incapacitated."
Li summed up the donor class's sentiment in two words: "It was insulting."
Li had previously raised alarm about Biden's decline before his withdrawal, concerns she says went unheeded within the party. She has since pledged to name Democrats who hid Biden's cognitive decline, a promise that tracks with the account she is now giving publicly.
Once Biden announced on July 21, 2024, that he would no longer pursue reelection, Harris wasted no time. Li described the next 24 hours as an aggressive campaign to lock down the donor base she had been cultivating behind the scenes.
"She was flattering people left and right. The first 24 hours were a very intensive charm offensive on her part. And that's how she was able to consolidate it so quickly. She flattered people up the wazoo. It made it abundantly clear that Biden had endorsed her."
But Li added a detail that complicates the narrative Harris's allies pushed at the time: Biden did not rush to endorse her. The New York Post reported that Biden endorsed Harris less than 30 minutes after his withdrawal letter was released, though Li claimed he "initially didn't want to endorse her right away" and that "it took him a while." That gap, however brief, suggests the endorsement was not the foregone conclusion it was made to appear.
Harris's representatives did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment on Li's allegations.
Li's allegations are detailed in her book, Unburdened, published by HarperCollins. The book chronicles the months leading up to Biden's suspended campaign, including Harris's donor strategy. Li, who once achieved a high profile within the Democratic National Committee, switched her party affiliation after the 2024 election.
Her public break with the party, and her willingness to name names, comes at a moment when Harris's political future is far from secure. Democratic candidates in battleground states have distanced themselves from Harris ahead of 2028, a sign that the party's own operatives view her as a liability rather than an asset.
Li's account also raises questions about how the Democratic establishment managed Biden's disastrous 2024 debate performance and the weeks of internal turmoil that followed. If Harris was already working the donor phones while publicly insisting Biden was viable, the party's leadership class was either complicit in the deception or oblivious to it. Neither option reflects well on the people who expect voters to trust them with power.
Polling in early 2028 primary states has reflected that erosion. In New Hampshire, Harris has faded behind other potential candidates, a trajectory that Li's revelations are unlikely to reverse.
Meanwhile, some Democrats have made the opposite bet. Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff has tied his Senate reelection effort to Harris even as most of his colleagues head for the exits, a gamble that looks riskier with every new insider account of how Harris operated behind closed doors.
Li's account remains, for now, a single-source allegation. No other donors who participated in the calls she described have come forward publicly to confirm or dispute her version of events. The specific "fake rule" Harris allegedly imposed on her staff has not been independently verified, and no recordings or transcripts of the donor calls have surfaced.
That does not make the account implausible. Li was in the room, or on the line, and her willingness to go on the record, under her own name, with a book behind it, carries more weight than an anonymous leak. But the full picture depends on whether others who were on those calls decide to speak up.
What Li has described is a pattern familiar to anyone who watched the Democratic Party's handling of Biden's decline: public reassurance, private maneuvering, and a donor class told to keep writing checks while the people cashing them planned for a different future. If the party's wealthiest backers felt insulted, ordinary voters who were told Biden was sharp and capable have far more reason to feel the same.