the washington post, another of our dear friends on a summer morning, eugene robinson. good morning to you all. morning. the grand counsel convened by jack smith will meet today in washington to continue its probe into donald trump s efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election. it s possible the jury will vote today on whether to indict the former president. the panel normally meets on thursdays, as well, so it could be that day. here is what former acting u.s. solicitor general had to say last night on msnbc. whether it is tomorrow or thursday, as andrew weissmann says, possibly two weeks, i think all all indications are donald trump is going to get indicted. jack smith sent a target letter to jack smith last sunday. you don t do it, particularly against a former president, unless you re pretty sure you have the goods. meanwhile, the former president continues to fundraise
the controls and more enforcement, but we haven t seen it. we ve seen an increase in guns. it was supposed to increase sales by 20%, but it s probably double. we asked the state department and biden administration to show where the enforcement led to tighter restrictions, and they didn t provide anything. you write about how the weapons sig sauer manufactured in germany, because they couldn t send the weapons to colombia, they mailed them to new hampshire, and from the u.s., they were mailed to colombia. yeah. is that legal? is that seems a little sketch yn y. yeah, well, first overseas deal was colombia in 2009. they were going to ship them to the police. the problem was, they were based in germany. they hadn t started manufacturing much in the u.s., so they had to send guns from germany, but it was illegal under german law. germany forbid people from sending guns to conflict zones.
think they believe that the impeachments of president trump were illegal, were totally political, and so they have they believe they have a constituency that wants to see them strike back in the same way at joe biden. i think kevin mccarthy is responding to that constituency. so we may be in that situation that you described. we may be in a situation where impeachment becomes a phase of a presidency. elise, there is a comic aspect to watching mccarthy speak like that, there is a political aspect, but there is also a tragic aspect to it, in the sense of, are we watching a democracy collapse in full, public view, in plain view, that these people like mccarthy are
because of his legal troubles or whatever, obviously, he is going to claim victory no matter what happens. he can lose in a landslide, he is going to claim he actually won, that it was rigged. we ve heard it all before. the question is whether that has diminishing currency among voters. even when we get to that point. and you have to guess that there will be a core, a hard core of trump supporters who will believe everything he says and believe he is being persecuted and that, by extension, they are being persecuted, because their leader is being persecuted. but will that hard core shrink? and i think you have to guess that probably it will, but maybe it won t. we just don t know. we are in uncharted territory.
attempted sales that were blocked. civil rights abuses. there were tortured in prison. the state department, which regulated it, turned it down, but that didn t stop sig. sig had a deal to send 150 handguns to the police in thailand. deal was blocked. what opened the floodgates since then? how did that restriction that had been there from the state department, how did that get overturned? couple things. first of all, since the obama administration, there has been a push to loosen regulations on gun exports and actually transfer it from the state department, which gives a lot of overview for civil rights and human rights abuses to the commerce department, which is actually, its job is to support u.s. businesses and u.s. exports. so there has been a movement as early as 2012 to loosen it. that was actually going to go