CHRIS HAYES: Right. And so in December 1973, that's your light bulb, that's the moment of, "This guy will be gone. He's done. He's toast. It can't-"

NICK AKERMAN: Right, right. But before that, it was one step after another realizing all this other criminality that was going on. I mean, including, I mean, even after that point, understanding how Nixon cheated on his taxes and just all of the things that he did. I mean, he was very petty, very greedy. He donated, as other presidents had up to that point, his papers to the U.S. government. You get a tax deduction for doing that. Well, in 1969, they changed the tax code with the Tax Reform Act of '69, which he lobbied against the provision that would continue to allow presidents to take that deduction, which all presidents had from Harry Truman straight through to Nixon. And so what he did when he realized he hadn't made the deduction prior to the passage of the law, he backdated a deed to the U.S. government to make it appear that he did, which is tax fraud. And then-

CHRIS HAYES: Wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm confused. Before the law changed, he hadn't affirmatively signed something saying, "I'm going to turn my papers over?”

NICK AKERMAN: In 1969, correct.

CHRIS HAYES: He didn't do that.

NICK AKERMAN: He just didn't do that.

CHRIS HAYES: They changed the law, and they got rid of it. They got rid of the ability to-

NICK AKERMAN: Gone, right.

CHRIS HAYES: There's basically a tax break for presidents that's in the tax code that says, "If you give your papers over, you can write off the value of those papers against your taxes."

NICK AKERMAN: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: Richard Nixon doesn't get his shit together to affirmatively get in under the wire in '69 and say, "Oh, I'm going to do this," so he then backdates it. He fabricates a backdated deed.

NICK AKERMAN: Exactly. And puts that in as part of his tax return. But then, on top of all that... Here's the part that's the real irony here. Here's what makes it so amazing. There is one exception to that new law, and that is tape recordings, that you can still donate to the government the value of tape recordings. So what does Nixon do?

CHRIS HAYES: Oh, my god.

NICK AKERMAN: He puts the tape recording system into the White House, into the Oval Office and into his office in the Executive Office Building so that he can over time use the same appraiser he'd been using for the papers, this Ralph Newman, who could-

CHRIS HAYES: Are you fucking kidding me?

NICK AKERMAN: No. Who could put any number he wants on these things. He could sanitize those tapes. And for the rest of his life, he would have a huge, huge tax deduction. The irony is-

CHRIS HAYES: So he creates the taping system in the White House for a tax deduction.

NICK AKERMAN: Exactly. Which the irony is, in the end, that's what does him in. That's why he winds up having to leave office because the proof in the pudding was all in those tapes.

CHRIS HAYES: Unbelievable.

NICK AKERMAN: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: It's hard not to make these parallels. They lurk over this whole conversation. I am reminded of a conversation I had, an exchange I had with someone that worked in the Tower Records in Trump Tower in, I think, the 1990s. Their flagship Tower Records store, it's a music chain, in Trump Tower. And they had, and I remember these from being a high school student in New York, they had these listening stations, which were pretty cool. You'd go in, you could listen-

NICK AKERMAN: Right, I remember those.

CHRIS HAYES: And mixed in with, say, top 40, there would one or two local acts who would pay Tower Records a hundred bucks to be able to be in a listening station. It was kind of cool because you can discover new artists. Somehow Donald Trump gets wind of the fact that the local artists are paying the store a hundred bucks to get in the booth and sends word to the general manager of the store that he wants a cut of the hundred bucks that are coming in from local indie bands in New York. I mean, that's a level of greed that I don't even have the... I have no subjective wherewithal to understand it.

NICK AKERMAN: Totally off the charts.

CHRIS HAYES: That's what you're telling me about Nixon. That's the same-

NICK AKERMAN: Oh, it's the same thing. I mean, I remember-

CHRIS HAYES: It's the same personality.

NICK AKERMAN: When I was going through all this stuff, I remember seeing a memo that he wrote to his tax preparer asking whether or not he could deduct the cost of his business suits as being president of the United States as a business deduction. And just having left law school and taken a tax course, I mean, that is insane. There's no way you can do that. I mean, where was this guy coming from?

CHRIS HAYES: Buddy, you're the president.

NICK AKERMAN: Right. Why would you want to deduct your suits? But it got to that level. That's how greedy this guy was.

CHRIS HAYES: It's funny because I think that the scope of all this, people's takeaway of Watergate is that the president was a crook, the break-in was supervised by him, and he covered it up, and it's not the crime, but it's the cover up. But the sheer scale and scope of what Nixon was up to I think doesn't actually get communicated generally.

NICK AKERMAN: No, no. People don't realize how widespread it was.

CHRIS HAYES: Just completely lawless.

NICK AKERMAN: Oh, I mean, it was also what they did with demonstrators and basically sending out goon squads to beat up demonstrators. It was orchestrated from the White House. It was talked about in the White House. And the whole program with the enemies list and trying to go after enemies using the federal agencies. I mean, what I found interesting was that it just that the bureaucracy was so well-attuned to being careful that a lot of this didn't happen because people in the bureaucracy didn't let it happen, and I think you see some of that happening even today.

CHRIS HAYES: Wow, that's a real-

NICK AKERMAN: Right. Which is amazing.

CHRIS HAYES: There are some crossover… I was gonna say… between these two series. There's some crossover characters.

NICK AKERMAN: Oh, definitely.

CHRIS HAYES: Roger Stone.

NICK AKERMAN: Roger Stone I had in my office questioning him in, oh, sometime in 1973, in the fall of '73. He was a witness at that time with respect to that incident with Ellsberg on Capitol Hill. What they did is they organized a bunch of young people, and Roger Stone was pretty young then. I mean, I was young, but Roger Stone was really young. And they put together a bunch of counter-demonstrators to go up there when Ellsberg was speaking to kind of deflect attention so that the Cuban Americans from Miami could get up to the stage to get after Ellsberg or Kunstler. So they were used as a diversion. Now, I don't think he had any reason to believe he was part of a diversion as such.

CHRIS HAYES: A diversion for the physical assault.

NICK AKERMAN: For the physical assault, correct.

CHRIS HAYES: Did they ever carry it out? Did they beat him up?

NICK AKERMAN: They didn't get to him, no. No, they never got to him.

CHRIS HAYES: So he was just a young right-winger who thought he was doing a Daniel Ellsberg counter-demonstration.

NICK AKERMAN: As best I can tell. Now, he also was involved in this whole effort in New Hampshire as well. I mean, he was sent up there by the Committee to Re-Elect the President, also known as “CREEP,” to go up there and make a donation from the Young Socialists, $500, to the McCloskey campaign. Now, if you recall, McCloskey was a congressman from California, an anti-war Republican who was running against Nixon in the New Hampshire primary.

CHRIS HAYES: So they wanted to taint him.

NICK AKERMAN: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: And then they leaked the story.

NICK AKERMAN: And then Roger Stone leaks the story that he's from the Young Socialists and, "I just donated $500 to McCloskey."

CHRIS HAYES: That's Roger Stone's lifetime career M.O. in a nutshell.

NICK AKERMAN: Exactly.

CHRIS HAYES: That story. I mean, that's what he's been doing-

NICK AKERMAN: Ever since. Ever since. And who knows what he did this time. I mean, I think he's in a lot deeper trouble than he was before. Certainly with the Russians and dealing with Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks, et cetera.

CHRIS HAYES: By the time you hear this, it's entirely possible that he has been indicted.

NICK AKERMAN: No question about it.

CHRIS HAYES: He says he expects that to happen.

NICK AKERMAN: Yeah, and I totally expect that he'll be indicted.

CHRIS HAYES: When you think about the waters the guy swam in, he's got a Nixon tattoo on his back.

NICK AKERMAN: Yeah. Right.

CHRIS HAYES: It wouldn't be a super shocking plot twist.

NICK AKERMAN: No, and he and Trump devised this whole crazy scheme where he supposedly leaves the campaign and he's fired, which he never was fired.

CHRIS HAYES: Oh, you think that was just a ruse?

NICK AKERMAN: Oh, that was a typical Roger Stone ruse to put him undercover so he could do things without having it go back to the campaign.

CHRIS HAYES: Right. Right, right, right. He's just... Right. He's a cutout, basically.

NICK AKERMAN: Exactly. When you look at the timing on all of this it just fits in perfectly as to what he was doing. When you look at what the Russians did it all coincides.

CHRIS HAYES: He goes outside the campaign so that what Roger Stone does, Roger Stone's just doing as a private citizen. This is your theory.

NICK AKERMAN: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: He's just doing it as a private citizen, and that's kind of some of the stuff that Nixon's folks would do, right? They're running these sort of parallel entities.

NICK AKERMAN: Exactly. It was the same kind of M.O.

CHRIS HAYES: When people say, you just talked about “CREEP” and the payouts to Hunt, when people talk about the famous line, right? This is the other thing that kind of comes down through the lore of people that don't embed themselves in Watergate, didn't live through it, is the “follow the money,” right?

“Deep Throat,” later revealed to be a top official of the FBI named Mark Felt, is telling Woodward follow the money. What does that mean?

NICK AKERMAN: Well, it was only significant to try and find out where the money came from into all of this and who had it and where it went. It wasn't really the kind of breaking point of all of this. The money was important. They had lots of cash.

What's interesting is Nixon has his own personal lawyer, like Trump had his own personal lawyer, sort of as the bag man. This was a guy by the name of Herb Kalmbach who essentially took care of all these monies that were spread around and wound up helping the office kind of identify where all this illegal money came through.

CHRIS HAYES: Right, because my understanding is if you're running an off-books operation out of the White House, which they are, that is, doing illegal things, which they are, you have to pay people to do this.

NICK AKERMAN: Costs money, yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: It costs money.

NICK AKERMAN: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: You got to pay for your operation, right? You're going to fly the Cubans up to do whatever.

NICK AKERMAN: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: They're not going to pay for it themselves, right? Then the question becomes where's the money comes from? The money generally comes from off book donations that are being made to “CREEP” right?

NICK AKERMAN: That's right.

CHRIS HAYES: That are then being channeled through and then paid for the off book criminal dirty trips and sabotage.

NICK AKERMAN: Exactly.

CHRIS HAYES: That's the basic equation.

NICK AKERMAN: They basically in a slush fund that they used.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah.

NICK AKERMAN: That's exactly right. Again, if you're talking about Mark Felt, first of all ...

CHRIS HAYES: This is the man later revealed to be Deep Throat.

NICK AKERMAN: Exactly. We considered indicting him at one point. He was lying to... He went to the Grand Jury. He lied about what he knew about these national security wire taps that were put in by the FBI that would've implicated L. Patrick Gray and also shown that he had lied and perjured himself before the Kennedy committee when he was being considered for permanent appointment to the FBI. It's kind of interesting.

CHRIS HAYES: Who's L. Patrick Gray?

NICK AKERMAN: L. Patrick Gray was the acting FBI director who was nominated by Nixon to be the permanent FBI director, who, by the way, also took stuff out of Hunt’s safe and burned them afterwards. This was the guy who was going to be the FBI director.

CHRIS HAYES: He was a Nixon loyalist, covering for Nixon?

NICK AKERMAN: Right, and also a crook.

CHRIS HAYES: Jesus Christ.

NICK AKERMAN: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: How many felonies end up... How many people do time or get convictions?

NICK AKERMAN: I got to believe there was 30-some odd. I can't remember exactly, but there was a lot. He had two attorney generals, which is quite amazing. Not to mention, a number of high-level White House staffers that were convicted. It was quite extraordinary.

CHRIS HAYES: There's a great Slate podcast, “Slow Burn,” which is about Watergate. I've read Rick Perlstein's great work about Nixon and a lot of the stuff I know about it comes from that. What do you see the kind of ways to think about the parallels and places maybe where the parallels are false where people should not try to sort of put the two together?

NICK AKERMAN: Yeah. Look, Watergate was a much wider scandal in some ways. We've talked about a lot of it. It covered... Well, although I guess you start talking about taxes, you have Manafort as well, so...

CHRIS HAYES: Well, the question is... I guess the question... Right. Before you say that, it's like, when you start pulling the threads, how far does it go? Right?

NICK AKERMAN: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: The president backdating his taxes wasn't part of Watergate. It was just the fact the president was a crook and took every opportunity seemingly to...

NICK AKERMAN: You got Manafort backdating documents.

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

NICK AKERMAN: That whole trial that we just went through was all about backdating documents on one hand to make it look like he had less income and later to make it look like he had more income.

CHRIS HAYES: Right. Right, right.

NICK AKERMAN: It all depends on where he was.

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

NICK AKERMAN: You've got a lot of the same things, but I think if you go to the central matters here you have the break into the Democratic National Committee, which was kind of in some ways... No one really ever knew what they were looking for, but, here, today, what you have is kind of a high-tech break in that was done by the Russians. If it was done with the connivance of the campaign, it's even worse, and you've got a high-tech break in that basically was used to elect Donald Trump.

Those documents were used just as a campaign would use them in any situation to try and degrade their opponent. They were even used to the point of the Russians acting as a boiler room for the campaign, which is a traditional presidential campaign sort of function where you have a campaign acting, or a group of people on the campaign acting, to sort of deflect bad things that happen or negative information that comes out.

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

NICK AKERMAN: So that when you've got the situation with the “Hollywood Access,” I mean, within minutes the Russians are out there putting out this information from documents that were stolen from the Democratic National Committee to try take…

CHRIS HAYES: Well, Wikileaks publishes it.

NICK AKERMAN: Right, but this is...

CHRIS HAYES: Assessed to be part of them.

NICK AKERMAN: Right, but the whole idea is they're taking on a campaign function.

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

NICK AKERMAN: They are putting stuff out there. They're coinciding it with the Democratic National Convention. They're putting it out just when the convention starts.

CHRIS HAYES: Yep.

NICK AKERMAN: They're doing all the kinds of things that are coordinated at least with what the campaign would want to have happen.

CHRIS HAYES: Right. The timing here, the... That relates back to the kind of... In some ways the sophistication of the “CREEP” methods, right? The doing things that will in the right time and in the right way screw up your opponent.

NICK AKERMAN: Right, but here when you've got computers and you've got data, and you've got a foreign power that is our archenemy that's involved with this whole thing, it is a much more serious situation.

Where I think you're going to find it's even worse is this whole area where they were micro-targeting specific voters in specific states and try and suppress the Hillary Clinton vote. I don't believe for a second that anybody in Russia would have the ability to know what precincts, what people in what states you would target in order to suppress that vote.

CHRIS HAYES: Right. One of the things that... To me, the big differences is... This is actually something that I had to revise when I read Rick Perlstein's great book, “Nixonland” — the conventional wisdom about '72 is that whatever Nixon's crimes were it wasn't what changed the outcome of the election because Nixon destroys McGovern in a kind of historical landslide.

The thought is, well, yes, Nixon did all this stuff, but it didn't... It wasn't the reason he won the election. When you read Perlstein's book, when you see how systematic and persistent the intervention in the Democratic Party primary process was, the ways in which they tried to guide the nomination towards McGovern.

All of this stuff, you start to think, "Well, it wasn't really a fair election, even for the margin." In the case of Trump versus Clinton, he won by 77,000 votes across three states.

NICK AKERMAN: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: A butterfly flaps its wings it makes a difference there.

NICK AKERMAN: That's right. Right. Although, you don't know whether it was the Comey factor that made the difference in the end.

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

NICK AKERMAN: Or whether it was the Russian factor, or both.

CHRIS HAYES: Right, but they're not exclusive.

NICK AKERMAN: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: My point being that when you talk about the legitimacy of the election and its fairness, when you're comparing '72 and “McGovern v. Nixon” versus “Trump v. Clinton,” it's just that margin is so much closer.

There's such a more plausible counterfactual argument to be made that the dirty tricks that we know were done, whether they were done with the campaign knowledge or not or the campaign's help or not, we know the dirty tricks happened, that their effect was determinative.

NICK AKERMAN: Yeah. It had to be because, like you say, there's three states with 70-some odd thousand votes.

CHRIS HAYES: Did you think... What did you think? There's a little bit of... My dad says this, it's like I can't believe we're here again kind of about Trump and about what we're seeing. Attacks on the role of law, subversion of these norms, paranoia, the diversions of the enemies list, the lashing out at the press. There's all these...

NICK AKERMAN: All the same.

CHRIS HAYES: Did you think when Nixon went down, when you guys issued your report, you'd done your job, you'd gotten your man, that some kind of cathartic event had occurred and a new era was dawning?

NICK AKERMAN: Yeah. I think that it was almost inconceivable to me that this could ever happen again. That's what I find so amazing about where we are today, that I think after this all happened Gerry Ford became president. People don't realize the vice president even went down in this on a totally separate matter for taking bribes when he was governor of Maryland.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, just getting sacks of cash delivered to him.

NICK AKERMAN: Right. Exactly, so that when have someone like Gerry Ford, who everybody believed was a decent guy...

CHRIS HAYES: Yep. Not a crook.

NICK AKERMAN: Not a crook, competent, not a bad guy. I think people thought we had turned the corner on all this and...

CHRIS HAYES: Turn the corner. The famous line is our long national nightmare is over, right? That's the...

NICK AKERMAN: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: Did you think it in a broader epochal sense? Like, we're going to put things in place that never let it be the case that something like this happens again?

NICK AKERMAN: Well, we thought so. We had campaign finance laws that were in effect that ultimately got overturned.

CHRIS HAYES: Church Committee too.

NICK AKERMAN: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: Which starts looking into all the dirty tricks that CIA had been up to.

NICK AKERMAN: Yep, exactly. In fact, I remember having this conversation with Bob Woodward saying, "We'll never see this again in our lives." This was, like, three years ago.

CHRIS HAYES: Really?

NICK AKERMAN: Yeah, and here we are again. It's really quite phenomenal that we are back in the same situation.

CHRIS HAYES: What's your understanding of why we are back in the same situation?

NICK AKERMAN: I think it's a matter of this particular candidate. It was just an unusual kind of confluence of events. We've always had this problem.

CHRIS HAYES: Right so you think…

NICK AKERMAN: Huey Long could've been our president at one time.

CHRIS HAYES: Totally.

NICK AKERMAN: If things had gone a different way. I think we were just found at this point in our history that we... And the circumstance of... It's almost an international issue of kind of this nativism and concern about immigrants, etc. that Trump just came along. He was the Huey Long that came along when it could happen. If Huey Long hadn't been assassinated, Roosevelt might not have been reelected.

CHRIS HAYES: To you, there's a perpetual threat of this kind of thing. I guess my question is does it come down... There's a sort of interesting question about is this a structural thing or is it just fundamentally kind of personality? In some ways it seems to me that Nixon's just a deeply messed up, damaged person who never should've been president of the United States. I think that's true for the current president.

NICK AKERMAN: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: Whether or not... Whatever Mueller finds, he's just a... As a character, as a person, as a personality he is damaged in a way that makes him unfit for the office he holds.

NICK AKERMAN: Right, and I think everybody in New York understood that.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah.

NICK AKERMAN: The time I'd been around and everybody knew what this person was like. It's not a surprise.

CHRIS HAYES: No, and in fact everyone in his administration is running to every reporter they can on background to tell them that that's how they feel.

NICK AKERMAN: That's right.

CHRIS HAYES: Was Nixon like that?

NICK AKERMAN: Well, Nixon had a certain respectability.

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

NICK AKERMAN: Even though he was... He was clearly part of the establishment, he had been the vice president for Dwight D. Eisenhower, he had run against Kennedy. He had taken some tough knocks. Some people felt sorry for him, but I don't think anybody ever considered him to be as paranoid and as crooked as he turned out to be.

CHRIS HAYES: See, that's one of the things I keep thinking about. I think about Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby a lot. Here are people, prominent people, the subjects of tremendous amounts of press attention, these aren't anonymous figures, right? Appearing to commit, in the case of Cosby has been convicted of committing, serial, serious, violent offenses.

You have a serial rapist going around, and he's got this big, horrifying, evil secret. Horrifying. Harvey Weinstein, horrifying, evil secret, and the amount of time they're able to keep their secrets from coming out is shocking.

With Nixon, it's kind of the same thing in that here's a guy who's a crook and he doesn't... The bubble bursts after a very, very, very long time. I just wonder about what the hell don't we know.

NICK AKERMAN: Yeah. I think everybody was shocked. There's much more that's come out since, too, about his background and what he did with Bebe Rebozo, who was his good pal.

CHRIS HAYES: You're saying Nixon?

NICK AKERMAN: Nixon, yeah, and certainly with Trump. We didn't know much of anything because he came out of nowhere basically in terms of his winning the nomination. He hadn't been on the public stage where he was a politician, where people had the chance to...

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

NICK AKERMAN: He wasn't vetted for anything.

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

NICK AKERMAN: Nobody knew. We still don't know what his tax returns look like, although Mueller has them at this point.

CHRIS HAYES: Are you sure he has them?

NICK AKERMAN: Oh, absolutely. That takes nothing for a prosecutor to get tax returns.

CHRIS HAYES: You think he has them. One thing that ends up being clear to me is that everyone around the president, including maybe the president himself, that just assumes that there are obviously... That the president has obviously committed indictable offenses. It's just a question of whether they're germane to the inquiry at hand or whether people will quote roll on him.

If you're in that office, having been in that special counsel's office, and you get the president's tax returns and there are multiple, clear indictable offenses unrelated to Russia that are in those tax returns, what do you do?

NICK AKERMAN: I think you go for an indictment.

CHRIS HAYES: You think you indict the president of the United States?

NICK AKERMAN: Yeah. Why not? If you've got a clear case, I would do it. If you had... Again, you've got to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

CHRIS HAYES: You guys thought about doing that with Nixon?

NICK AKERMAN: Oh, I think most of the office was in favor of it.

CHRIS HAYES: Why didn't you?

NICK AKERMAN: Jaworski believed that because the impeachment was going forward...

CHRIS HAYES: At this point, impeachment is already going forward.

NICK AKERMAN: Right, it’s already going forward.

CHRIS HAYES: And Jaworski is the guy that replaces Cox.

NICK AKERMAN: He replaces Cox. We all had a lot of respect for Jaworski. He came in, kept everybody together, and just kept things moving.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah.

NICK AKERMAN: Even though I think he was right at the time, even though I was ready to indict him for just about everything. He believed that the process was moving forward, that they... House was looking at impeachment.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah.

NICK AKERMAN: The evidence was there, and that that should be done before any kind of prosecution.

CHRIS HAYES: That I think is probably prudent, but you got to wonder, they're not dummies over there in Mueller's office, and they look over on Capitol Hill and they think...

NICK AKERMAN: Right. It's a completely different situation.

CHRIS HAYES: Totally.

NICK AKERMAN: Because back then you had a Democratic House, you had a Democratic Senate.

CHRIS HAYES: Yep.

NICK AKERMAN: You didn't have Fox News blasting every single day coming up with phony statements about what the news is.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah.

NICK AKERMAN: We all watched Walter Cronkite. It was a much different world. You have to wonder if the same thing happens to Mueller what happened to Cox whether you'd have the same huge reaction that occurred when Cox was fired.

CHRIS HAYES: This is the big question about these parallels. Nick Akerman is a MSNBC legal analyst. He was on the Watergate special counsel's team. He's an attorney at Dorsey and Whitney, which is a very fancy firm. He was defend you for a pretty penny.

NICK AKERMAN: Absolutely. I only represent innocent people.

CHRIS HAYES: Only if you're innocent.

NICK AKERMAN: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: That's an important stipulation. This is great, Nick. Thanks.

NICK AKERMAN: Okay. Thank you. It was great being here.

CHRIS HAYES: Huge, huge thanks to Nick Akerman, who I just could listen to for hours. I could do a five-hour podcast with Nick Akerman who just has an exceptional way of communicating and great voice, and he's always so energetic. I always think, like, good god would I not want to go up against him in any kind of a trial setting, so huge thanks to Nick Akerman.

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