MY STORY
Ever since he first learned to grip a pen, Robin has been writing. As a boy at recess, he sat off to the side with a spiral notebook on his lap, scribbling stories. For his birthdays, he’d draft a script and corral his friends into acting it out and filming it on a camcorder. In high school, he put out weekly chapters featuring his closest friends as the characters. The written word has always been his saving grace.
He was born to interracial immigrant parents, a mother from Ecuador and a father from the Dominican Republic. The two – sharing a native language, Latin-based cultures, but not their skin tones – met in the U.S. Army and got married, just 13 years after nine men in black robes decided it was OK for whites and blacks to do so. His family faced economic hardship, living four to a cramped, New York basement apartment, and they moved to South Florida when he was five years old in search of a middle-class life.
He spent his childhood and youth in Hialeah, FL, a working-class, predominantly Cuban American Miami suburb. As first in his high school class, he wrote and delivered his first speech at 17.
He attended Harvard College, where he became an editor of The Harvard Crimson, and he spent a summer writing stories for The Miami Herald. After graduation, he worked on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., serving as a press spokesman for Congressman Charles B. Rangel of Harlem and a speechwriter to Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
He then attended Harvard Law School, serving as an editor of the Harvard Law Review and publishing three pieces on stop-and-frisk, criminal immigration consequences, and the intersection of jury nullification and the death penalty. After graduating, he rejected out-of-hand lucrative opportunities at big law firms and returned home to Miami to become a local criminal prosecutor. He served as a division chief, exclusively prosecuting homicides, supervising younger attorneys, and trying 30 jury cases to verdict.
After seven years as a prosecutor, he joined the historic Select Committee Investigating the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol as an investigative counsel, leading interviews of witnesses, from former Cabinet secretaries to leadership within Secret Service; co-leading on of the blockbuster summer hearings on President Trump’s attempts at corrupting the Department of Justice; and, for the final report, writing the chapter on President Trump’s 187 minutes of inaction during the attack and appendices on the day’s intelligence failures and delayed response by the National Guard. He now serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law and Chief of Staff to a member of Congress, Hon. Glenn Ivey.
Writing remains his preeminent passion. He likes to say he is a writer role-playing as a lawyer.
Memory Lane
Where Robin plots out his novels.
The mission of the January 6th Committee.
Dad, Mom, and Robin, in the early ’90s.
Robin behind the dais for the Committee hearing on the attempted corruption of the Department of Justice.