Since the news broke of Michael Cohen’s guilty plea, we’ve been getting a ton of legal questions from our readers, and I’m going to try to answer some of them. On the one hand, impeachment is a political process. But if everything Michael Cohen says is true — that the president instructed him to violate campaign finance laws by paying hush money to women who said they had affairs with him in order to influence the election — that is just the sort of thing the framers of the Constitution were concerned about. And they thought that interfering with the integrity of elections could well be an impeachable offense. Which leads us to our next question that some of you were wondering about: In general, for impeachment purposes, most scholars say that only the actions of a sitting president should matter — that criminal misconduct before a president took office should not be grounds for impeachment. But they make one exception: Did the conduct cause the president to obtain his office illicitly and corruptly? And that’s what the Cohen allegations seem to add up to. And one question we got via Twitter was: I think they’re basically surface similarities because President Clinton’s conduct — however ugly and questionable — was private conduct. In the Trump case, if the Michael Cohen allegations are correct, you may well have him corruptly obtaining his office. And that’s much more closely tied to the presidency than what was said about Bill Clinton. Lastly, one person asked if Cohen could be pardoned. The president can pardon Michael Cohen if he wishes to. Were he to pardon somebody who poses a threat to him, in a criminal proceeding, that would be the use of the president’s office not to offer clemency based on neutral grounds — but on self-interested grounds. And that, too, could raise the prospect of impeachment.