check would be forthcoming soon. and sure enough, it was, on valentine s day, 2017. we have our top legal experts here. chuck rosenberg and joyce vance are former u.s. attorneys and msnbc contributors. thank you for joining us here. chuck, let me start with you. what s your reaction to the journal s reporting on michael cohen and specifically the piece if he could not get a pardon, he might cooperate with probation reports. how do you read that? defendants are always looking for a way out. once they re caught or are in trouble, there s a couple paths to redemption or at least to lessening the impact, whatever they did wrong. a pardon is one, but that s extraordinarily rare. very few people get them. even fewer people have a personal connection to a president in order to ask for one. if cohen s attorney asked for one, well, i guess that shock me. the typical path to redejs mpti is cooperating. that s how most defendants work