call or go on line today. >>> before the break we spoke with the "wall street journal's" michael rothfeldho has just been reporting michael cohen was stockpiling money, expanding his home equity line of credit building up nearly 3/46 a million dollars during the campaign to fix problems for candidate trump. we know at least of the stormy daniels payment, it's unclear what the other money was for. back with carl bernstein and joining us as well is cnn chief political analyst gloria borger. we should say we don't know what he used the rest of this money for, whether it was something relating to president trump or not, but certainly the timing of all this is really interesting. >> right. that's what's the most interesting thing to me aside from the large amount of the sums, of course, of money here is the timing in the "wall street journal" piece which is that the money that cohen started receiving was around february 2016, which as we both know having been there was when his fortunes and his poll numbers started to rise as a presidential candidate. we know he won the new hampshire primary o

joining us is one of the "wall street journal" reporters who broke tonight's story, michael rothfeld,nk you for being it us. thank you for your reporting on this. what's the implication here. michael cohen ended up taking $774,000 combined in home equity loans in the month before the election? >> that's right, ali. so the question is, what prosecutors are looking at is whether any laws are broken in terms of how michael cohen may have gotten access to cash during this period to use to help solve problems for president trump to keep things quiet, such as the stormy daniels payment. or were any misrepresentations made, as you said, in his -- in his applications to banks or statements to banks or in terms of what kind of campaign finance laws may have been violated. what we found was that -- well, first of all in november 2015, michael cohen's in-laws refinanced an apartment and took $529,000 out of the equity from the apartment. and he co-signed the loan for that. so it's not clear what happened to that money. but it is unusual in the sense that he had never co-signed a mortgage for the

react what we just heard there from michael rothfeld. there is so much confusion surrounding this still. we're making inroads but there is still a lot of confusion. >> that was actually a really good point that michael rothfeld made about the point that "the washington post" reached out in january to the white house for comment saying this is what we know about the payment to stormy daniels. therefore the president was briefed on this, as the white house said he would have been. and trump of course aboard air force i said he did not know about the payment. does he mean he didn't know about it at the time or didn't know about it at all? of course rudy giuliani on fox news said the president had just learned the night before he did the fox news interview what the payment is for. unless the without is lying, it seems clear that trump did know as early as january what this payment was for. >> it's almost like a william faulkner novel where you have every character telling the story from a different perspective. we heard from michael cohen, f