WASHINGTON – If President Trump is found to have directed Michael Cohen to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, those would be “impeachable offenses,” according to the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.).

“Well, they would be impeachable offenses, whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question,” Nadler told CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday on “State of the Union.” “But certainly they’d be impeachable offenses because even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office, that would be an impeachable offense.”

In new filings, federal prosecutors are alleging that the president ordered Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer, to make two campaign finance law violations, which are felonies.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who will be taking over the House Intelligence Committee come January, wouldn’t go as far as Nadler in calling the campaign finance violations an “impeachable offense.”

“I think we need to wait ‘til we see the full picture,” Schiff said on “Face the Nation.”

But he said that he thought Trump could end up spending time behind bars.

“My takeaway is there’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time,” Schiff warned on “Face the Nation.”

Nadler told Tapper that he believed the court documents show that the “president was at the center of a massive fraud, several massive frauds against the American people.”

“It is now our job, the job of the Justice Department, special counsel and the Congress, to get to the bottom of this, to find out exactly what was going on, to find out the extent of the president’s involvement,” Nadler said. “To find out exactly what did the president know and when did he know it, so we can hold him accountable.”

The New York Democrat believed that could include an indictment of the sitting president.

“I disagree with the Office of Special Counsel and the Department of Justice: There is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits the president from being indicted,” Nadler said. “This country originated in a rebellion against the English king, we did not seek to create another king.”

“Nobody, not the president, not anybody else, can be above the law,” Nadler continued. “There’s no reason to think that the president should not be indicted.”

Schiff instead suggested that an indictment would come after Trump leaves office, pointing out it would be up to the next president to decide whether to pardon Trump, as President Gerald Ford did for President Richard Nixon.

“Now I think the prosecutors in New York make a powerful case against that idea,” Schiff argued, speaking of a pardon for Trump. “All the arguments they make about Michael Cohen, the idea that while people are out walking precincts and doing what they should do in campaigns, the rich and powerful seem to live by a different set of rules.”

“So this was the argument for putting Michael Cohen in jail on these campaign violations. That argument I think was equally made with respect to ‘Individual One,’ the president of the United States,” Schiff said.