On Tuesday, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion and campaign-finance charges in a New York City courtroom, and the most significant moment in the proceedings came when Cohen asserted that he had committed some of his crimes “at the direction of the candidate”—meaning Trump. “The words ‘coördination with’ and ‘at the direction of’ will haunt the Trump Presidency,” The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin told me, soon after the hearing. “Cohen directly implicated Trump as a co-conspirator in a felony.”

As part of his plea agreement, Cohen admitted that, during the 2016 campaign, he helped arrange payments to two women who were prepared to claim publicly that they’d had extramarital affairs with Trump, and that the purpose of these payments was to influence the outcome of the election. One of the women was Stephanie Clifford, who in her career in adult films has used the stage name Stormy Daniels. The other was Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model whose experience as the target of a “catch and kill” operation by the Trump-friendly tabloid the National Enquirer was detailed by Ronan Farrow earlier this year. Trump isn’t directly named in the case against Cohen—and neither is the National Enquirer—but the court documents make repeated reference to a Presidential candidate whom Cohen was working for. “If he were anyone other than the President of the United States, he would have been indicted on this evidence,” Toobin said. “And that’s a profound thing to think about.” In the context of how prosecutors generally look at cases like this one, Toobin added, Trump is “more culpable—because he’s actually the beneficiary of this conspiracy.”

But Trump has not been charged in connection with Cohen’s actions. And it is Justice Department policy not to indict a sitting President. As Toobin understands it, Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian actions during the 2016 election, has said that he will honor that policy. “That means the only remedy is in Congress, with impeachment,” Toobin said. With Republicans in control of both the House and Senate, impeachment remains a remote possibility. But that may change if Democrats win the House in November. In May, Toobin wrote about the impeachment debate within the Democratic Party. The Party leadership was resistant to the idea, Toobin said, “but that was before this direct implication of Trump in a crime.”