Below is my column in new research published in the Washington Post that turned up an interesting case involving the prosecution of the great-great-grandfather of President Joe Biden. What was interesting about the account was not the criminality, which can be found in the history of many families. Rather it was the intervention of allies and negating of the conviction of Mose Robinette that was so ironic in light of the current controversies.
Here is the column:
The Bidens have shown a legendary skill at evading legal accountability. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, Biden family members often marshal political allies and media to kill investigations or cut sweetheart deals.
The Bidens swim in scandal with the ease and agility of a bottlenose dolphin. From his own plagiarism scandal to his brother’s role in killing a man to his son’s various federal crimes, Bidens have long been a wonder in Washington.
It turns out that it may be something of a family trait acquired through generations of natural selection.
A historian recently discovered that Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather, Moses J. Robinette, was accused and found guilty of attempted murder. The case followed a strikingly familiar pattern.
Fittingly, Robinette was a government contractor. He was paid to give veterinary care for the horses of the Union army during the Civil War, taking the job after his hotel was burned down.
At 42, Robinette sounded like his great-great-grandson. He was married and described as “full of fun, always lively and joking.” But the good times ended on March 21, 1864 in Beverly Ford, Va., Robinette got into a fight with another contractor, John J. Alexander, who overheard Robinette bad mouthing him to a female cook. When Alexander confronted him, Robinette pulled a knife and, in the ensuing fight, cut Alexander repeatedly.
It was an early version of President Biden’s “corn pop” story where he faced a gang member wielding a straight razor. However, in this version “the Bad Dude” was a wagon master, and it was the Biden family member wielding the knife. Robinette left Alexander bleeding from multiple cuts. His trial noted that he was intoxicated and had incited “a dangerous quarrel.” (It appears that back then it was a Biden arguing over what truly constitutes “incitement.”)
Robinette argued a lack of intent to commit murder, insisting “I had no malice towards Mr. Alexander before or since. He grabbed me and possibly might have injured me seriously had I not resorted to the means that I did.”
The argument would make Abby Lowell blush, since there was no evidence that Alexander had even been armed. Robinette was found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to two years’ incarceration at hard labor.
That is when the case took another familiar turn. Friends of Robinette interceded with the Army and powerful political figures.
There were long delays. It took three months for the commander of the Army of the Potomac, Gen. George G. Meade, to confirm Robinette’s sentence. His friends then went to Waitman T. Willey, the senator from West Virginia, who went to bat for Biden. Willey pressured President Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, John G. Nicolay, who then leaned on the judge advocate general, Joseph Holt, to send over a report and full accounting of the case.
Biden’s associates argued that, although Robinette had been the only person armed, the victim was a teamster “much his superior in strength and Size, all under the impulse of the excitement of the moment.”
They beseeched Lincoln to “think of his motherless Daughters and sons at home! … [Praying for] your interposition in behalf of the unfortunate Father…and distressed family of loved Children, Union Daughters & Union Sons.”
Their final argument was the one quintessentially Bidenesque. They told Lincoln that he was a political ally who was “ardent, and Influential … in opposing Traitors and their schemes to destroy the Government.” (It appears, even back then, the Bidens were union men.)
It worked. Lincoln was known for leniency in pardons, and he signed a “Pardon for unexecuted part of punishment. A. Lincoln.” on Sept. 1. 1864. Robinette was a free man.
So Robinette was found guilty at trial, severely cut an unarmed man, but was freed with the help of a U.S. senator with a plea that he was a loyal political ally.
Whatever the true merits, it showed the importance of having friends in high places. Or, as the president once put it more bluntly, “No one f**ks with a Biden.” It is family scripture that runs from Moses to James to Joseph.
Now, 160 years later, Moses’s great-great-grandson was found by a special counsel to have willfully retained classified material, mishandled that material for decades, and to have probably shown the classified material to a ghostwriter who lacked clearance. He was spared any criminal charge in part because he would make a sympathetic defendant due to his diminished mental faculties.
If that is not enough, political allies are rallying to his side to stop any corruption investigation while calling his detractors “traitors” and “Putin lovers.”
After charges were brought against a former FBI asset for his false claims about bribing President Biden, Democratic operatives and media figures went into full conspiracy-theory mode to end any further investigation into the Biden family.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) went so far as to declare that anyone now looking into the Biden corruption scandal is by definition “a knowing asset of Russian intelligence” and “acting as an agent of Vladimir Putin.”
It is, of course, perfectly absurd. The charges against Alexander Smirnov have no bearing on dozens of allegedly corrupt payments and hundreds of emails that are being investigated by Congress. Try to ask the Bidens about the millions they have pocketed from foreign sources, and you are some kind of Russian dupe.
NBC News correspondent Ken Dilanian absurdly declared that the long ago-debunked letter by intelligence officials claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a fake and part of a Russian disinformation campaign must now be accepted as true. He must have missed that the laptop has been authenticated separately, irrespective of Smirnov’s lies.
Not only do Biden allies want to end any further discussion of the family corruption, but former Democratic Sen Claire McCaskill has angrily demanded that the media stop any more fact checks of Biden on any subject. She previously attacked witnesses exposing the Biden censorship system, including calling some “Putin lovers.”
It really has very little do with the Russians. This is what Bidens do best.
When Hunter previously threatened a Chinese businessman by warning that his father was “sitting next” to him and waiting for money, Hunter stressed that he should tell the head of his company that “the Bidens are the best at doing exactly what the chairman wants.”
After generations, the Bidens are still showing the same nimble qualities of great-great-granddad Moses. Indeed, they could replace the legend on their family crest with “Manus manum lavat, “one hand washes the other.”
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.
N.B.: Notably, after this column ran the usual suspects are gathering around a “readers added context” that briefly appeared (before being taken down by Twitter). It suggested that I was arguing in the column that the Bidens are genetically prone to crime in discussing Biden’s great-great-grandfather’s conviction for attempted murder. That is manifestly untrue. (The “trait” was actually a reference to their ability to deal with scandal, not criminality itself). It takes an utter lack of sense of humor to interpret the reference to natural selection in managing legal controversies as a literal argument a genetic preposition toward crime. However, humor like reason is a stranger in an age of rage.
The column was obviously drawing ironic, not genetic, comparisons to the current allegations. In anticipation of the next spin, I also referred to the “scripture” of the Bidens but I was not suggesting that they are divine or prophets. I also compared the Bidens to bottlenose dolphins but I do not believe that they are aquatic mammals. Finally, I do not believe that there is a genetic loss of humor. The faux outrage is merely adaptive behavior in this political ecosystem.
