Washington (CNN) If accusations that President Donald Trump directed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to make illegal hush payments to women who had alleged affairs with Trump prove to be true, New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler said those actions would be impeachable offenses.

"They would be impeachable offenses. Whether they're important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question," Nadler, the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday morning. "Certainly, they're impeachable offenses, because, even though they were committed before the President became President, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office."

In a sentencing memo on Friday, prosecutors from the Manhattan US attorney's office wrote, "In particular, and as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1." Individual-1 is the term prosecutors have been using to refer to the President.

Trump has denied the affairs and has not been accused of any crimes related to the payments.

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