REVISITING BENEDICT ARNOLD’S CHAPTER IN AMERICAN HISTORY AND ITS RELEVANCE TODAY (originally published 2016)

The name Benedict Arnold is infamous in American history and is synonymous with the epithet “traitor”. The details of his treason may not, however, be fresh in the minds of most of us today and are worth retelling as they present parallels to events confronting our nation in the present day.

Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington, Massachusetts, Arnold volunteered for service and distinguished himself in several military campaigns in the early stages of the Revolutionary War. However, when the Continental Congress created several new posts for Major General in its Army, he was passed over in favor of some junior officers, a snub that he brooded over despite later being promoted to Major General by George Washington.

Due to injuries that he suffered during a military expedition in 1777, Arnold’s career was interrupted for several years while he recuperated in Philadelphia, where he began socializing with Loyalists (British sympathizers) who constituted a wealthy and elitist social class in that city. Because he enjoyed a regal lifestyle, he soon found himself heavily in debt. While in Philadelphia, Arnold courted and married a young socialite, Peggy Shippen, who happened to be a close friend and former paramour of a British officer, Major John Andre, who became the head of the British espionage system in New York. Shippen helped establish secret communication channels between Arnold and Andre, and the latter, learning of Arnold’s disillusion with his fledgling government and his massive indebtedness, began grooming him to become an asset for the British. Thus, as Arnold recovered from his wounds and prepared to return to duty, Andre encouraged him in his efforts to seek an appointment to become the commander of the fortifications at West Point, New York, a critical stronghold for the revolutionary forces located in a strategic position on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River. Arnold did so, and George Washington, having great confidence and trust in him, assigned him to the West Point position. Further negotiations between Andre and Arnold, some of which were facilitated by Shippen, culminated in Andre offering Arnold 20,000 pounds (enough to satisfy his indebtedness) in return for his assistance in surrendering the West Point fort to British forces.

After assuming command of the fort in August 1780, Arnold set about to weaken its defenses and strength, including distributing troops and supplies elsewhere so that a British siege would be more likely to succeed. Approximately 6 weeks after taking command of the post, Arnold met with Andre secretly at a collaborator’s house near the fort, and handed over military plans and strategic information regarding West Point. He also issued passes for Arnold’s use in passing through Continental Army lines on his overland trek back to British lines.

The plot was foiled, however, when three patriot militiamen captured Andre and discovered the incriminating documents in his possession, which were sent forthwith to George Washington. Arnold received word of Andre’s capture from a junior officer who was not yet aware of his treachery, and immediately fled to a British warship anchored in the Hudson River not far from the West Point fortifications.

The British rewarded Benedict Arnold for his treason by making him a brigadier general in its army. He eventually sailed off to London, but not before he placed an exclamation point on his betrayal by commanding British forces in an attack on a Connecticut town in the vicinity of where he was born and lived as a youth, burning it to the ground.

Arnold’s notorious treason against nascent America holds lessons for us today as our nation confronts very similar and even more dangerous efforts by another foreign power — Russia — to infiltrate, disrupt, and destabilize our democratic form of government. While the Benedict Arnold chapter in our history is not in any way evidence of similar treasonous conduct by anyone in present times, it nonetheless is a compelling example of why our nation must vigorously investigate all aspects of a foreign power’s attempts to subvert the foundations of our government, manipulate our elections, corrupt and seduce our leaders (whether in the private sphere or within the government itself), or to otherwise recruit institutions and groups in an effort to shift allegiance and influence to that foreign power.

The justification for a thorough examination of foreign, and specifically Russian, efforts to infiltrate and undermine our country’s democratic and Constitutional form of government is both objective and multi-faceted:

A candidate for the highest office in the nation who is allegedly indebted to that foreign power for large and undisclosed loans, including laundered money, for his cash-strapped business ventures;

The candidate’s refusal to disclose financial information, such as tax returns, during and after the campaign for office;

A series of secret meetings between representatives of the candidate and agents of the foreign power during his campaign;

False denials that the meetings occurred by the participants, followed by contradictory statements about the substance of those meetings;

Intelligence information that the foreign power meddled in the election that placed the candidate in office;

The post-election repudiation by the candidate of his nation’s own intelligence reports regarding the foreign power’s interference in the election process, with the candidate citing its leader’s denials as persuasive;

The candidate’s post-election efforts to distance our nation from its historically close joint defense allies in NATO, which has pushed for sanctions against Russia because of its aggression against the Ukraine and Crimea;

The Kremlin’s initiation of a project, code-named “Diplomacy”, to infiltrate and leverage the central role of the NRA in the politics of a “major political party” (affidavit of FBI agent filed in connection with indictment of Russian operative Maria Butina on federal charges of conspiring to infiltrate U.S. political groups to advance the agenda of the Russian government).

The above is just a sampling of the publicly disclosed information pertaining to the “Russian Collusion” matter. There are undoubtedly more circumstances known to national security and intelligence officials that are warning signs that our democracy is imperiled by the concerted campaign of a foreign power to weaken the United States from within its own political and governmental framework. The publicly known facts alone, however, not only justify but mandate an independent investigation into this subversive activity no matter where it leads. To turn a blind eye to such warning signs, especially at the insistence of one who is the centerpiece of the inquiry, as well as the concern that our democracy is being undermined from within, would be a betrayal of the paramount duty we owe to our country. Would George Washington have naively accepted as true a denial by Major Andre that he had compromised Benedict Arnold? The treachery of Benedict Arnold, had it not been uncovered, would have cost us a fort. The Russian infiltration threatens our democracy itself. We need to be mindful of the warning Cicero issued over 2000 years ago to the Roman republic:

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. For the traitor appears not a traitor — he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation — he walks secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city — he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.”