It runs in the family.
We keep talking about the Biden crime family, but who knew just how far back that sort of thing went.
President Biden’s great-great-grandfather received a pardon from President Lincoln, according to newly discovered documents in the National Archives.
Biden’s relative in the incident, Moses J. Robinette, got into a fight with another Union Army civilian employee while camped along the Rappahannock River near Beverly Ford, Virginia, as the Civil War raged on March 12, 1864, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The fight left the other man, John J. Alexander, bleeding from knife wounds, and Robinette was charged with attempted murder and was incarcerated near Florida.
Three of Robinette’s friends were officers in the U.S. Army, and they petitioned Lincoln directly to overturn the sentence.
They argued Robinette’s sentence was overly harsh for “defending himself and cutting with a Penknife a Teamster much his superior in strength and size, all under the impulse of the excitement of the moment,” according to the Post.
We’re talking about an era notorious for being able to get away with murder if you had the right political connections. Consider the time that President Buchanan helped Rep. Daniel Sickles (the kind of outrageous character who could only have existed in the 19th century) get away with killing US Attorney Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key. But that sort of thing didn’t happen unless you were connected and Robinette clearly was connected enough for his appeal to make its way to the president via a senator.
As a former lawyer, Lincoln tended to err on the side of pardons. So getting one was far from impossible.
What do we know about Moses J. Robinette? Not much. But it is important to remember that while Biden and his media lackeys built a working-class Irish mythos for him, the reality is he came from men who had money, shady business habits and mental instability.
Every few years, Biden wrote, Sheene, Sr., bought new Cadillacs for himself and his son, and for Biden, Sr., he bought a Buick roadster. There were also horses, airplanes, and yachts. According to Sheene III, Biden, Sr., and Sheene, Jr., were allowed to participate in fox hunts in Maryland’s countryside because of their lineage. (The Robinettes traced their roots from England to the Pennsylvania Colony.) “We were aristocrats,” Sheene III told me.
The Robinette, which Biden tellingly kept (his full name is Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.), has extremely non-Irish roots. It suggests Norman ones instead.
No one seems to have done much of a workup on Moses J. Robinette. The original Washington Post article notes that he was described as a, “man of education and gentlemanly attainments”. Like a lot of people at the time he seems to have both made and lost money in the Civil War.
What we do know is that there’s a family history of Biden drinking, criminality, unstable behavior and political connections going back for a long time.