In the days since an Alexandria, Virginia, jury convicted Paul Manafort on eight counts of bank and tax fraud, President Donald Trump has abandoned all semblance of subtlety with regard to the possibility that he might pardon his former campaign chairman. “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family,” he wrote on Twitter the following morning, calling Manafort “brave” for refusing to “break” under pressure. On Thursday, the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, confirmed speculation that clemency could be in the offing, telling The Washington Post that Manafort was indeed among several individuals Trump had discussed pardoning. “He feels Manafort has been mistreated. Nobody in a case like this gets raided in the middle of the night, put in solitary confinement,” Giuliani said. “They tried to crack him and it didn’t work. Over the last two to three weeks, he’s expressed anger and frustration about how he’s been treated.”

Trump was ultimately convinced that any pardon for Manafort should wait until after Robert Mueller wraps up his Russia probe, according to the Post. (The White House press secretary said the president “has not made a decision on pardoning Paul Manafort or anyone else.”) But even without officially issuing a pardon to Manafort, Trump might have waded into choppy legal waters simply by dangling the prospect of absolution. Trump, after all, is being investigated by the special counsel for potential obstruction of justice—an allegation that is unlikely to lead to an indictment, as I have previously reported, but one that could serve as the basis for articles of impeachment. If Manafort were to believe he has a fighting chance of having his slate wiped clean, that could eliminate his incentive to cut a deal. Trump, in effect, would be tampering with a potential witness.

“This is yet one more instance, this time out of the mouth of his own lawyer, that the president is signaling to Manafort that a pardon may be on the way. It is impossible not to see this as encouragement to a witness in a criminal investigation to withhold cooperation,” Bob Bauer, who served as White House general counsel to Barack Obama, told me. “It is remarkable that Giuliani and his team do not see how the president, with this conduct, continues to do extraordinary damage to his position in the ongoing investigations.”

Whether Trump’s conduct is illegal depends on his intent, according to Harry Litman, a former United States attorney and deputy assistant attorney general. “I think it’s really straightforward legally—but that doesn’t mean straightforward factually,” Litman told me. “If Trump is either dangling a pardon or giving a pardon in order to prevent Manafort from giving truthful testimony to Mueller, that’s obstruction of justice. And it doesn’t change it that he’s the president of the United States. In some ways, it aggravates it.”

Other members of the D.C. Bar, however, are less convinced that Trump using his pardon power could ever be considered a crime. “I don’t think exercise of an explicit constitutional power can be part of any obstruction case—even if the reason for it is illicit or in other people’s judgment wrong,” a Washington defense lawyer, who has worked on previous White House ethics cases, told me, citing Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon as a historical precedent. Whether it could be construed as an abuse of power, this person said, would be a political question, with Congress—not the courts—as final arbiter.

Indeed, legal experts are mostly in agreement that the presidential pardon power is absolute, and that a sitting president cannot be indicted until he leaves office. In the meantime, a Republican-controlled Congress is exceedingly unlikely to impeach Trump unless Mueller uncovers far more damaging information. “Does Congress seem to have any stomach for getting into it? Probably not,” Litman quipped. “The real story in many ways of the last 18 months is congressional Republicans kind of turning their heads at every misdeed or dereliction by Trump. I wouldn’t think that this would be the thing that would finally inflame them and say, ‘We have to commence impeachment inquiry.’”