The subject of traitors in American history is highly controversial, even incendiary. We are not referring to spies here, or those who gave information that might have undermined America, but only to people in government and in the military. Any list would be controversial, and being a traitor is not only based on actual judicial declaration, but on the deleterious effect that government and military people had on the security and stability of the American nation.
Certainly, Benedict Arnold would be at the top of the list, having plotted to hand over West Point and thousands of American military to the British in 1780, during the American Revolution.
Also, many would say, with some qualification, that former Vice President Aaron Burr, who plotted to steal the election for President in 1800 from his own running mate, Thomas Jefferson, and was brought to trial for plotting with others to create an independent nation in the middle of the North American continent. committed treason. He was arrested, charged with treason, and put on trial, although found not guilty by Chief Justice John Marshall in the trial that he faced. Of course, Burr also killed Alexander Hamilton in a legal gun duel over the issue of honor, caused by the bitter rivalry between the two men over Hamilton’s intervention in the Presidential election of 1800, when Hamilton helped to promote the election of Jefferson, his ideological rival, but one that he trusted, while he believed Burr was a scoundrel who could not be trusted with power.
Additionally, Civil War Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and Confederate States of American President Jefferson Davis, have become the center of accusations that they were traitors, as they worked to separate the South from the nation in the Civil War. This has led to the movement to take down many Confederate statues and monuments of these and other Confederate leaders.
Once we get past these cases already mentioned, the issue of treason and traitors is more murky, but one could say that for someone to engage in league with a foreign nation’s plot to intervene in elections that would bring a person to power, could be considered treasonous. So if the accusations of Russian collusion are proved true, as is now being investigated by the Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and several Congressional committees, and supplemented by excellent investigatory research by major news media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NBC, CNN and others, then we may be able to declare that Donald Trump and his campaign and many of his advisers and cabinet members have engaged in a conspiracy that could be seen as treason.