Ex-Dem fundraiser torches Biden as book launch implodes: 'No one wants to read'

Lindy Li was a Biden bundler, not some fringe operative, and now she's saying the DNC took donors' phones so nobody could film or photograph what they were seeing up close. That's not a vague complaint about "messaging." That's a described physical act: hand over your phone before you get near the president. If true, it tells you the cover-up wasn't just spin from the podium, it was logistics, planned and executed by people whose job was to protect the party's biggest fundraising asset from its own donors' cameras.

The timing is almost comic. Her book is reportedly struggling to find readers, and the cynical read is that she's saying this now because it sells copies. Maybe. But that doesn't make the underlying claim less plausible, it just means we should judge it on the specifics rather than her motives. We've had eighteen months of insiders trickling out similar stories, staffers describing scripted appearances, aides managing camera angles, a debate performance that finally broke through what all that phone-confiscating was apparently meant to prevent.

What's remarkable is how unremarkable this has become. A year ago this would have been the story of the week. Now it's one more data point in a pile that already includes the debate stage collapse and a dozen anonymous staffer accounts. The people who spent 2020 through 2023 insisting anyone raising this was peddling disinformation owe an explanation, not just a shrug.

If Li is telling the truth, this wasn't a communications strategy. It was a decision by people around the president to manage what the country was allowed to see of him, right down to confiscating the phones of the people writing checks to keep him in office.