By admin 
Prominent South Carolina attorney Dick Harpootlian has sued the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice over a years-old allegedly unsuccessful Freedom of Information Act request.
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Harpootlian made his first request for the records in March 2021, and the FBI notified him later that it had found 219 records that are responsive to his request, his lawsuit said.
But Harpootlian never got the records, his lawsuit contends.
“I’ve been waiting more than 50 years for those records,” Harpootlian told The State newspaper in an interview Tuesday.
In 1969 and 1970, Harpootlian was an organizer in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations on the Clemson campus and an editor of the Clemson Tiger, the student college newspaper.
“I believe that around the time of the anti-war demonstrations, which I was involved in, that the FBI had agents on campus doing surveillance and other things,” Harpootlian said.
Records kept by the bureau might support his theory, he said. The 1960s and early 1970s were a turbulent time on America’s university campuses as students opposed to being drafted and the Vietnam War engaged in widespread protests.
The FBI and Department of Justice national press office had no immediate response to a query about Harpootlian’s lawsuit, which was filed Sept. 14 in U.S. District Court in South Carolina. The judge assigned to the case is Sherri Lydon.
The lawsuit asks the FBI to “process and release” more than 219 records that the FBI notified Harpootlian it had turned up more than two years ago.
According to the lawsuit, the FBI told Harpootlian that it had located the 219 records but would close out the case unless Harpootlian notified the bureau that he still wanted the records.
Harpootlian made that notification in a timely manner, the lawsuit said.
The last notice Harpootlian got from the FBI was Jan. 8, 2025, telling him about the records it had, the lawsuit said.
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The FBI has never told Harpootlian “which of the 219 pages it will release and which it will withhold, or why. It has never invoked a single exemption. It has never released a single page,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit further said the FBI said it was “administratively closing” Harpootlian’s request, but “no statute authorizes that disposition. No regulation authorizes it.”
Harpootlian is asking Judge Lydon to declare that the FBI and the Department of Justice have violated the FOIA and order the defendants to process the located records and “release all non-exempt portions on an expedited schedule,” the lawsuit said.
The records sought by Harpootlian are described in his lawsuit as “copies of all information, including but not limited to files, correspondence, reports, surveillance, and/or any other records concerning Richard A. Harpootlian of South Carolina.”
The lawsuit specified a date range of Jan. 1, 1966, to the present.
The request also asked the FBI to “search the FBI’s indices to the Central Records System, including manual indices, as well as all Field Offices for the information responsive to this request related to: Richard A. Harpootlian of South Carolina. Also known as Dick Harpootlian. Born January 23, 1949.”
Harpootlian, whose offices are in downtown Columbia, is one of South Carolina’s highest profile attorneys.
In addition to being one of the defense lawyers for fraudster and accused killer Alex Murdaugh, Harpootlian is a non-fiction writer whose book “Dig Me a Grave” chronicled Harpootlian’s work as a prosecutor in the 1980s when he won a successful death penalty conviction against serial killer Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins.
Earlier this year Harpootlian helped engineer the overturning of Murdaugh’s murder convictions by the S.C. Supreme Court.
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