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And that is a crime. i don't follow the point of because -- >> kiersten, let's just be honest. if donald trump -- okay, let's say donald trump had taken $150,000 or 15,000, pick a number, of his own money and decided to run it through michael cohen to buy ads on television and didn't want to tell anybody, would we be upset, would we be trying to impeach him right now? he used the money to benefit the campaign. it's not what he did was wrong, it's what he didn't report was wrong. so this conspiracy -- you're making up -- every campaign has almost -- almost every campaign for president, i think ...

It and that's something prosecutors use all the time in criminal cases. if he wasn't doing anything wrong, why did he lie about it? but it's a signal feature of the trump administration and all of his people that they lie all time whether they need to or not. they get asked a question and they think they did something that was wrong and so they lie about it. it's just nuts. but, yes, it's a very good question. why go to all that trouble if you don't know you're doing something that is very, very sneaky. but still that doesn't establish that he knew he was violating a federal regulation. even i...

Accusing the president of the united states of having directed a crime. >> what they say is michael cohen's two campaign finance felonies were directed by a person named as individual one, that person is donald trump. that means that donald trump also committed two felonies. >> no. >> laura: david two felonies, is that what the statute says? >> i think joe has a pretty thin read for the president to hang his hat on. i think if there really feels an intention and if that money was paid and if anything that michael cohen says ends up being true that that's a huge problem. and there's also, as yo...

Reporting violations where they failed to report some things inadvertently. i think in the obama case it was what are called 48-hour report, failure to report contributions. in none of those cases that i'm aware of has the actual candidate or the president been implicated in ordering it be done. it wasn't that obama said let's not report these contributions. those are kind of the more -- the regular violations that you see in presidential campaigns. here we have an allegation that the president directly ordered cohen to pay money to prevent people from talking about alleged affairs. that's a p...

And depending on the facts and depending on the timing of the repayment it may well be that it's a willful violation, which would make it a criminal offense. otherwise it's just a campaign finance reporting violation which is civil violation directed mostly at the campaign and not so much the individuals involved in certain actions. >> good point. so if it's a campaign violation then the campaign has to pay it, and it would be civil, right, depending on the timing? >> it would be a reporting violation. that the campaign should have reported the loan, and they failed to do so. >> what does that...