The MeidasTouch Podcast - Jack Smith Breaks Silence on Trump in First Public Speech
Episode Date: October 16, 2025MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s first public event which took place at UCL Laws and Meiselas provides the powerful highlights from the event that lasted ...over 80 minutes. Get 20% off your entire order @LaundrySauce with code: MEIDAS20 at https://laundrysauce.com/MEIDAS20 #laundrysaucepod Visit https://meidasplus.com for more! Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Well, he's back, and he's not holding back.
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith made his first public appearance since Don
Trump has taken office and has destroyed the Department of Justice. Frankly, it's really the first
public appearance we've seen of Special Counsel Jack Smith really ever in this type of forum.
So he spoke before the UCL Faculty of Laws, which is the Law School at the University College of London.
And it's in connection with the UCL Global Center for Democratic Constitutionalism.
He was interviewed by former prosecutor, you know him, Andrew Weissman, who did a good job with this interview.
And special counsel, Jack Smith, was not holding back.
Now, the full interview lasted over an hour.
I went through it for you.
It's actually nearly two hours.
And I took the major highlights for you that I think will provide you with a comprehensive overview of all of the key portions of this.
lecture, if you will, of this Q&A session between special counsel or former special counsel,
Jack Smith, being questioned by Andrew Weissman. He's referred to as the state of the United States,
a conversation with Jack Smith. Jack Smith talks about his cases against Donald Trump. He talks
about the Supreme Court ruling that ultimately gave Donald Trump absolute immunity. Special counsel
Jack Smith or former special counsel, Jack Smith, addresses what he sees.
with this kind of farcical prosecution of James Comey and Hibbs' observation.
He talks about what it means to be a good prosecutor,
what the role of the DOJ actually means,
what it means to be a non-political public servant.
This was powerful.
I'm going to admit, it also brought a tear to my eye,
just seeing what kind of normalcy,
what competent prosecutorial ethics looks like.
This is why I went to law school.
at Georgetown law because I love the law, you know, and I care deeply about law and order.
And when you see it here for yourself, I think that you will see why former special counsel
Jack Smith was the right guy, right person for the job, and also how abysmal the Supreme
Court decision granting Donald Trump absolute immunity was.
And how far the DOJ has lost its connection to what it's supposed to be, how Trump has Trump
has destroyed it. So let's go through these critical clips. So here I think is the most important
of the most important portion of the interview. It's about an hour and eight minutes or so
into the interview to about an hour and 19 minutes in where Andrew Weissman asked special
counsel Jack Smith about his view of what Donald Trump has done to the DOJ. And they pivot to talk
about some of the current cases that Donald Trump is doing. And also Trump's vindictive
firing of DOJ career prosecutors.
Here, play this clip.
Given what we have seen in the Department of Justice under the second Trump administration,
and given your history as a state prosecutor, federal prosecutor,
working under Republican and Democratic administrations and your work at the ICC,
sort of what, sort of what's your,
sort of diagnosis of what is happening to the department.
And similar to the question I had about what happens
when the next president comes in and this sort of tip for tack concern,
are we also at the Department of Justice leading to a spiral
where let's assume we have a Democratic administration
at some point and what do they do then?
Do they try and clean house?
And does it become a tit for tat where we essentially do no longer have a civil service
in the federal government, which is supposed to sort of eradicate this issue of
we only hire Democrats, we only hire Republicans?
So how do you sort of see where we are and the prospect of what's going to happen?
You're right about the compound questions, by the way.
That's definitely, yeah.
Let me break that down and take it when I think reverse order.
Yes, I think the attacks on public servants, particularly nonpartisan public servants, I think
it has a cost for our country that is incalculable, and I think that we, it's hard to communicate
to folks how much that is going to cost us. If you think getting read of the people who know
most about national security is going to make our country safer, you do not know anything
about national security. And that's happening throughout the department. It makes me concerned.
And, you know, this idea that if you didn't vote for the current person in office, you can't be trusted to be a government employee.
In the United States, we tried that.
It's called a patronage system where you got the job because of who you supported, not because you knew how to do the job, the competence part.
And we know that it's rife with corruption and it's rife with incompetence.
And so that makes me very concerned going forward.
But in terms of, you know, what I see now, and it goes back to the analysis that I gave you before,
if you are driven to achieve certain outcomes, no matter what, that's a real problem.
That's not something I saw in the Department of Justice.
And I think it bears mentioning, you know, I worked in the department for years, Republican, Democrat, Republican.
I worked in the – I was the acting U.S. attorney in the first Trump administration in Tennessee.
Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on.
This case in New York City where the case against the mayor was dismissed in the hopes
that he would support the president's political agenda, I mean, just so you know, nothing
like it has ever happened that I've ever heard of.
Recently we had this issue of like, I guess it was people in the defense department using signal
to communicate with each other about war plans, clearly classified information.
I can tell you, Andrew will tell you, there is no administration, Republican or Democrat,
that does not open an investigation in that situation.
Nothing.
Where the lives of servicemen are put at risk, zero.
Never happens.
So, again, when we get to a place where the outcome is what matters and not the process,
and the last one I'll just throw out is this latest prosecution of the former director,
or the FBI. You know, there's a process to secure an indictment. There's a process of predication
having some evidence before you do that. Here from, and again, I only know what I see myself
in the media, but the career prosecutors, the apolitical prosecutors who analyzed this,
said there wasn't a case. And so they brought somebody in who had never been a criminal prosecutor
on day's notice to secure an indictment a day before the statute of limitations ended.
that just reeks of lack of process.
I'll add to that the Trump selected U.S. attorney resigned over this.
So not just the career people, but also an actual presidential selection resigned.
And if you listen to the president, it was fired, but another way was pressured out to not bring the case.
Yeah, and I just want to be clear, too.
don't see, and I think a lot of Americans do not see this as a political issue, process shouldn't
be a political issue, right? Like if there's rules in the department about how to bring a case,
follow those rules. You can't say, I want this outcome. Let me throw the rules out. That's why
frankly, you see all these conflicts between the career apolitical prosecutors I worked with
because they're being asked to do things that they think are wrong. And because they're not
political people, they're not going to do them. And I think that explains why you seem.
the resignations, you've seen people leave the department. It's not because there are enemies
of one administration or the next. They've worked through decades for different administrations.
It's just they've been doing things apolitically forever. And when they're told, no, you've
got to get this outcome no matter what. That is so contrary to how we're all raised as prosecutors.
I think that's been the center of all the conflict. So I'm going to end with a couple
sort of questions about sort of more personal ones. So sort of obviously,
in the United States, there's been a lot of billification, but particularly of you and your team.
And if you don't want to talk about yourself, just sort of what have the consequences been
in terms of just the personal lives of either yourself or your team in terms of how they have
to live, whether they can find jobs, you know, what is it like to have to live through
that kind of harassment for what seemingly is just doing your job.
Yeah, I mean, what's interesting for me is, you know, I live my life in a way where I was
not seeking to be someone whose name people knew, right?
I was a prosecutor or public servant, and having done this job, now I'm this guy where people
interact with me in a way that they didn't before.
But I'm really just like one of many sort of public servants who want to do their job,
want to do the right thing, want to be public servants. And so, yes, if you don't know,
everybody who worked on my team was fired, not just the lawyers, but the administrative staff
as well. I think these are people who have spent their careers sacrificing for the communities
they want to protect for our country. I'm really upset that people like that not only are being
vilified, but that it's hard to get their stories out of who they are.
Because I think the way we communicate with each other right now, it's very hard to tell a narrative.
Because if you saw the narratives of some of these people, I mean, just briefly, there's an agent who worked on our case, who served our country overseas multiple combat tours.
Decades is an FBI agent, fired days after his wife died of cancer.
People hear these stories. No one's going to think that's okay.
So, yeah, I think that's real part.
The reporting on that is the career, senior career FBI people tried to get Cash Patel,
the FBI director, to put off the decision given his personal circumstances and failed.
And this most senior person at the FBI making that plea was then fired.
Yeah, I mean, these are people, lawyers decide, these are people who put their lives on the line.
And for them to be fired for stuff like this, I just don't see how anyone can hear those
stories and not be moved by it.
And then have people sort of landed on their feet or has it been a struggle?
Obviously, I think people know there's been all sorts of executive orders targeting law firms.
There's been actions targeting people, targeting companies, and a chilling effect.
as a result of that?
And to what extent has that sort of affected people on your team
in terms of their lives going forward?
Yeah, well, the good thing for the folks on my team
is they're excellent lawyers.
And they are people who are really good at their profession.
There is a chilling effect out there,
and there's a lot of bad in it.
The good, I will say, is we are living in a moment
where you get to find out who people are.
You can find out what institutions stand for
or companies or law firms.
And so I think it's been revealing for all of us about the different ways things have gone there.
I think the folks on my team in the long run will be fine because they're good people and I believe that they're going to have good outcomes.
But the stuff their families have had to go through as a result of this, again, if you knew the stories of these people, nobody would think that's okay.
Any final thoughts that you have for our audience about sort of the rule of law thinking about what we're experiencing.
ed states and how you sort of think about it, having seen sort of the rule of law globally.
Yeah. So, you know, I think of public service as a privilege. And my life has been so, it's been
so great to live the life I had as a public servant, not only the things I've got to do, the things
I've got to be a part of, but the people I've got to work with. And when I talk to young people
a lot today. I see people concerned about a career in public service or having second thoughts
about a career in public service because of the moment we're in. And my message would be you should
double down on that. You may have to find a different way to serve the public than you planned,
but it's such a privilege. It's such a good way to spend your days and live your life. And I think
having something hard to struggle at is one of the best things you could possibly have in your
life. And so I think we're in a moment now where people have to think about what matters to them
and if they believe in things like the rule of law, they believe in democracy. If they're blocked
in helping the way that they thought they could help, they need to take that commitment and find
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Now, Special Counsel Jack Smith then addresses the Supreme Court's ruling that gave Donald Trump
absolute immunity for official acts.
Watch how Comey describes it.
Very methodically, very calm.
You'll play this clip.
So the first thing to talk about is just the decision generally.
We argued for a different outcome.
So obviously, I was disappointed in the outcome.
But I think a really important thing to understand here is,
while I didn't agree, and I'll talk in a minute about the reasoning,
I didn't agree with it, we followed it.
There was never a question that we were going to follow the law
as the Supreme Court said the law now was.
And I think that's really important to understand
because I think once we get in a position
where we start talking about
maybe not filing court opinions we don't like,
we are lost in terms of the rule of law.
And so the reasoning,
I very much agreed with the reasoning
in the dissent in that opinion,
more than the majority,
but that was the law.
In terms of that particular point,
I would say two things.
First, if you looked,
and we have this,
if you're interested in it,
It's in the final report that I wrote with my team.
How you can think about these issues is on a spectrum.
If you look at how the district court, the appellate court,
and then the Supreme Court thought about these things,
and then the dissent and the majority in the Supreme Court.
There were rule of law considerations, the things we're talking about tonight,
and then there were also considerations of giving the executive enough latitude to act,
and I think the world was boldly and fearlessly,
that the executive would be able to lead the nation.
The district court and the appellate court and the dissent strongly weighted the rule of law considerations.
The majority opinion strongly weighted the other considerations and, to your point, brought up this scenario of, well, if you do this, then there's going to be this response.
My view on that is a couple things.
One, I think if you do that, it's tantamount to saying you can never prosecute.
powerful high officials because there could always be a concern that they'll stay in power
and then come after people. The problem is not prosecuting high officials who did something wrong
when you do it according to the processes of law in your country. It's the retaliation. That's the
problem and that's the thing that we should be preventing. And also, you know, in the history of
our country, what they're talking about when we've done that, it hasn't happened in the past.
And so I disagree with that.
But again, that's the reasoning behind the opinion, the ultimate opinion.
The law is what it now is in terms of official acts being immune.
And that's something that we have to follow.
Then you have special counsel, Jack Smith, talk about a little bit more about James Comey
and about just this idea of show trials and historically what we've seen in dictatorships
with show trials.
here play this clip.
We are having this conversation on the day of the arraignment of the former FBI director,
James Comey, in the Eastern District of Virginia with, you know, many procedural irregularities.
You also mentioned that in addition to process, you mentioned transparency as something else
that you think about in differentiating sort of a righteous prosecution and transparency.
Could you talk about sort of what you mean about that?
Sure.
And again, like take the Navalny trial.
We know, or trials, we know that whenever he was going to offer a defense,
they decided to not have those in public and not have the public access to it.
Same thing, you know, and I should be clear.
A lot of times in a prosecution, if there's sensitive information or the protection of witnesses,
you can't make everything public if you're going to also say protect witnesses
or protect sensitive information.
But the goal should be to make as much.
much of it public as possible and make your reasons for doing things as public as possible.
I think when people don't start, don't understand what the courts are doing and don't
understand what prosecutors are doing, that's when distrust happens.
I mean, another way I think of it is, if we want trust in our government institutions,
it comes down to three things.
And this is, I'll put it in the lens of a prosecutor, which is what I know.
One, you have to be competent at what you do.
You have to know how to do it.
You have to have experience at it and talent at it.
You have to be someone who actually knows the rules of your profession.
The second is you have to have integrity.
You have to be a truth teller and someone who can be trusted to do things for the right reasons.
But the third, and the third one's often the hardest, is you need to be able to communicate
one and two to the public.
You need to be able to let the public know that you're a truth teller and you actually
know how to do this.
you don't have a transparent process, it's impossible to do those things. It's impossible
to, whether you're competent or not, it's impossible to show that. And if you are competent,
you shouldn't be afraid of a transparent process. Special counsel, Jack Smith, then addresses
what he views it means to be a good prosecutor, what he learned. Here play this clip.
I was taught as a young prosecutor, no fear, no favor. I was taught as a young prosecutor,
you do the right things. You do it the right way.
and for the right reasons.
And, you know, when I was a young assistant district attorney in Manhattan, I thought
that's what you were taught at the Manhattan DA's office.
When I got to the Eastern District of New York, I was like, wow, that's the same philosophy
here.
We do it the same way.
When I got to the ICC and what I tried to imbue on the people in my office when I was
running the last office overseas was those same sort of principles.
And what I found is a public servants who want to be good public servants.
wherever they are, that those are really guiding principles.
If you do those three things, do the right thing, do it the right way and do it for the right
reasons.
If you're hitting those marks, you're going to be okay as a prosecutor.
He then talks about how he was trained, how prosecutors should not be political, how he's
worked in Democratic administrations, Republican administrations.
He's never asked people, what's your political view?
What's your political view?
And he then, you know, basically without saying it draws that contrast to what we're seeing today under the Trump regime, play this clip.
Maybe to be more pointed, given the environment they were in in the United States, how, if at all, does their political views or even their party affiliation factor in or not factor in to your decision about who you would bring on?
Yeah.
So most of the people who ended up working on this investigation from the beginning to the end when I was special counsel were people who were already actually working on the investigations when I took over.
They were working on the separate cases.
I did bring in a few people to assist.
Those people I brought in were all former, long-time former federal prosecutors who had worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations over and over again.
And one of the topics I really like to talk with folks about because I don't think.
gets talked about enough is the just incredible high level of integrity and competence and
willingness to sacrifice to the people who do this work.
And I'm talking about the people I worked with in the special counsel's office, but the
Department of Justice in the U.S., the FBI, are filled with people like this.
And these are people who are not self-promoters.
They do not like to tell their own story.
They cannot start a sentence with I.
They start that with we.
These are team players who don't want anything but to do good in the world.
They're not interested in politics.
And I get very concerned when I see how easy it is to demonize these people for political ends,
when these are the very sort of people, I think we should be celebrating.
The people on my special counsel team were like that.
The idea that politics played a role in who worked on that case or who got to
chosen is ludicrous and, and Andrew, you know, and this is another thing that I think if you're
not inside the U.S. Department of Justice, the idea that politics would play a role in big cases
like this, it's absolutely ludicrous and it's totally contrary to my experience as a prosecutor.
Again, the time I was a junior prosecutor, when I was, when I started out, if I had told
my boss at the DA's office, hey, I've got this case.
I was going to bring it, but you know, I just found out the guy is a friend of the DA,
so maybe we could find a way not to bring it.
Or if I said, hey, I wasn't going to bring this case because it's not a legitimate case on the facts and law,
but I saw that he was an enemy of the DA, and maybe we shouldn't bring it.
My boss, my first boss, he would toss me out a window, right?
Toss me out a window.
When I was the chief of the public integrity section, we were doing the highest profile corruption cases around the country.
I had no idea of the politics of people who work for me because it was entirely irrelevant to our work.
And that was the same when I was in Brooklyn, New York.
It was the same when I was in Tennessee.
And it's one of those things that I think sometimes you hear what's in the news.
If you talk to anybody in the department who's been there for decades, that's just not even close to what that work is like.
And I don't think that there's enough people out there saying that because the people who do that, they don't want to be out for.
front talking about those things, putting themselves sort of in the limelight.
They just want to do good work.
And so the people on my team were similar to what I saw throughout the department during my
career, apolitical people who wanted to do the right thing and do public service.
More from special counsel, Jack Smith, addressing why he brought the case involving Trump's
theft of classified documents that were found at Mar-a-Lago.
Why did you bring that case in Florida when it eventually got assigned to Judge Eileen Cannon play
this clip. Two things here. One is kind of the, I just wanted to address the note you said about
some people criticize things. I think one thing, and it kind of will explain a lot of my thinking
about these things. The idea of people criticizing things, particularly in the media,
if you are a good prosecutor, that is noise, and you need to tune it out. I think people in the
media can do a very good public service in explaining what's going on in court,
in explaining concepts, legal concepts that are complex.
But when we get to the point of people opining,
you should have done this, you should have done that,
good prosecutors learn to tune that out.
I know whenever I've done a big case that no matter what I do,
some people are going to think I'm a villain
and some people are going to think I'm a hero.
Some people are going to think I'm great
and some people are going to think I stink.
You tune that out.
You just have to tune that out.
And so, like, whatever was going on in the media about that, I don't have any idea about that because it's not something I follow in terms of the actual case.
It was very important to me that we do all our work by the book, and that means the same way you do it in a DOJ case.
If it wasn't a case of this much public interest, and under that way of thinking, the place to venue this case was in Florida.
There were arguments you could venue parts of it, other places, certainly.
And there are times that the DOJ venue has pieces of cases in different places.
But the usual way is to have it in one place.
And in this particular case, the documents were in Florida.
The major acts of obstruction, the two series of obstruction that we charged in the case happen in Florida.
And I would also just, at the last point I would just add is we didn't have the immunity decision that came later.
But if we had, by charging it in Florida, all the conduct that we charged was after the presidency.
And so the idea that any of this will be official acts would be a lot less than it otherwise
would have been if we had charged things that had happened in Washington, D.C. beforehand.
There's another powerful moment at about an hour and five into this Q&A session, play this clip.
You do not want to be saying things before trial that are going to make it hard for the defendant to get a fair trial, right?
You don't want to be sort of polluting the jury pool in your favor saying things that they, because the usual case is a case.
where the government has a lot of power and has a megaphone, and the defendant most often
doesn't. And so those rules, that way of doing things, has been a department tradition. And
in fact, a lot of the local rules of the courts that we practice in say limit what you can say
as a prosecutor. And so in my role of special counsel, I handled things very much as I did throughout
my career. It's like we often say, do you're talking in the courtroom, not on the courthouse
steps. And so that's how I did things.
I think that it is worth a conversation going forward about how we move things and how we handle things and how we think about these things.
Now, I'm not arguing in favor of a sort of wholesale, you know, one side blast something out on social media and then the other side does and we do that sort of thing.
But I do think we need to think about it differently because we're in a different age now and we communicate with each other differently.
The Archibald Cox thing, if you haven't all seen it, it's worth.
When you go home tonight, you got nothing to do for half an hour, pulling it up on the YouTube.
It's artful, it's heartfelt, integrity is just oozing out of him.
It's also really hard to do.
Partially because to do that without making an argument you're not interfering with the defendant's
trial rights is really hard.
There's unique situations you can do it.
But this goes back to my previous point of like if you want to have confidence in our institutions
of government. You want there to be a bond of trust between citizens and the government they put
in place. You have to have competence, integrity, and you have to communicate it. That third one's
hard. And I will say that kind of like dinosaurs like myself who have done it the old way, I think
we need to have a conversation to think about how to be better at it. But I don't want to have
that conversation where we start interfering with people's right to have a fair trial. So I think
it's a good endeavor. It's a thing we should talk about, but I also think it's harder than we think.
And I want to start with this as well, where Andrew Weissman goes over special counsel Jack
Smith's background, because I think it's important for you to hear what it means to be an
experienced person, the types of prosecutors who used to work at the DOJ, in contrast to these hacks
that Donald Trump puts in now like Lindsey Halligan, who have never been federal prosecutors in their
life at all who are now bringing these just terrible cases, be clowning a once proud institution
known as the DOJ. Jack Smith's background right here, play this clip. Jack was a graduate of Harvard
Law School. He was a career prosecutor. And the unusual part, I think, of your background is that
Jack was a prosecutor at the state level in the United States, at the first.
federal level in the United States and also internationally.
I really can't think of anyone who has that confluence of experience.
In addition, something that sort of dear to my heart is you were also a prosecutor at sort of
main justice, which is in Washington, so that's centrally, but also in the field in various
parts of the United States, not just in New York, but also in Tennessee, as we'll talk about.
As I mentioned, Jack started his career as an assistant district attorney, that's the state level, in New York for the revered and legendary Robert Morgenthau.
He then joined the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of New York.
That is where I also started my prosecutorial career, and as both of us know, it's all downhill after that.
And the Eastern District of New York is, I think everybody who is a federal prosecutor will say the best job you've ever had.
But you went on to many great things after that.
You went to Maine Justice, as I mentioned, where you were the head of the public integrity section
that either handles or oversees all of the public corruption cases in the United States.
You leaded that, and it should go without saying, but unfortunately, I need to say it.
And it was the people who were prosecuted were based on the facts and the law,
and it didn't matter if they were Republicans, Democrats, independents, or no party at all,
if they had committed a crime worthy of prosecution.
As I mentioned, Jack did not only work in the United States.
You then had two separate stints at the ICC, which we're going to,
to talk about at the office of the prosecutor for the international criminal court in the Hague.
You were the chief of coordinations for the investigations division. We'll talk more about
sort of what you did there. And between those two stints, you went back to the United States
where you were the first assistant, that's the number two, and then the number one, in the U.S.
Attorney's Office, that's a federal office in Tennessee. You went back to the ICC,
and stayed there for about four years,
and then you got a phone call,
which is sort of basically why we are here today.
And that is on November 18th, 2022,
the then United States Attorney General of the United States,
that's Merrick Garland appointed you
to be the special counsel for the Department of Justice
looking into two things.
That is the investigation that was ongoing
with respect to Donald Trump and classified documents
and also the handling of the sort of lead up
to an event surrounding January 6th
and the effort to prevent a peaceful transfer of power.
So with that as an introduction,
welcome very much to UCL and to GCDC.
It is really just a privilege to have somebody
with your background.
Now, at UCL Laws, YouTube, it's about an hour, 20 minutes plus of the actual interview.
If you want to watch the full interview,
but I really went through it to capture what I think were the key moments right there
to give you the highlights as we always try to do in a very comprehensive way here on the Midas Dutch Network.
Thanks for watching.
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