Joe Biden campaign donor Alex Murdaugh was charged Thursday with killing his wife and 22-year-old son. The lawyer representing the accused murderer, who faces a slew of additional charges for financial fraud and illicit drug distribution, is also a Biden donor.
Murdaugh's attorney Dick Harpootlian is a self-described "Joe Biden guy" who donated the maximum allowable sum of $5,600 to the Democrat's presidential campaign in 2019 and 2020. Before that, he contributed $20,000 to the Draft Joe Biden super PAC in 2015. The attorney's wife, Jamie Lindler Harpootlian, also donated $5,600 to Biden's most recent campaign. She currently serves as U.S. ambassador to Slovenia, a role for which the president nominated her in 2021.
Since 1990, the Democratic power couple have donated more than $800,000 to their party's candidates and committees, according to Open Secrets. It's possible that Murdaugh, who contributed $2,800 to Biden in 2020, funneled his donation through his attorney. Harpootlian helped raise at least $100,000 in his role as a bundler for Biden's campaign that year.
In addition to representing the Biden donor accused of murder, Harpootlian is best known for making racist comments about Nikki Haley, the former Republican governor of South Carolina. In 2012, the Anti-Defamation League condemned Harpootlian for "trivializing the Holocaust" after he compared Haley to Adolf Hitler's mistress Eva Braun. He was widely denounced again in 2013 for telling Democratic Party activists to "send Nikki Haley"—whose parents immigrated from India—"back to wherever the hell she came from."
Harpootlian is a member of the South Carolina Senate, where he has served since 2018. He recently told the Washington Free Beacon that Biden's aides were "too woke, and too on social media" and the president needed to "fire somebody" because "whatever they're doing, it's not working."