Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Hardballs,” former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance discussed an NBC News report that President Donald Trump’s jailed former lawyer Michael Cohen is cooperating with Manhattan prosecutors on an investigation into the Trump organization potentially falsifying records.

Matthews said, “This case could be a big case if you’re taking the president of the United States down into a criminal matter. The question I have, I guess, as a non-lawyer, is what’s the penalty for this kind of case?”

Vance said, “So that really depends on how it’s ultimately structured. If they were able to make some sort of a tax charge here, which we don’t know — we don’t know if they have tax records — we could be looking at a lengthy violation for a felony. It’s certainly not a misdemeanor.”

She added, “The felony crime is a serious one, it carries a lot of collateral consequences. But most significantly is the threat there is jail time involved, and any amount of jail time in the state system in New York would be very unpleasant for the president of the United States.”

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