The bad news for President Donald Trump keeps coming his way, notwithstanding a generally bravura performance on the foreign stage this past week in Riyadh, Jerusalem and Vatican City. Yet while he was overseas, his colleagues here in the United States have been advising him to hire criminal defense counsel, and he has apparently begun that process. Can the president be charged with obstructing justice when he asks that federal investigations of his friends be shut down?

Most legal scholars agree that the president cannot be prosecuted while in office and that the appropriate remedy for presidential criminal wrongdoing is impeachment.

Impeachment, of course, is traumatic for the country, as it involves Congress' dislodging from the presidency the person validly, legally and constitutionally entitled to hold it. Under the Constitution, the House of Representatives serves as a sort of grand jury and determines whether to impeach by a simple majority vote. The charge must be for treason, bribery or another high crime that strikes at the integrity of the government. Obstruction of justice — interfering with a criminal prosecution — is probably one of those crimes.

I say "probably" because, though the Supreme Court has not ruled on this, it formed the basis of the charges brought against President Richard Nixon and those prosecuted against President Bill Clinton, and the legal community has generally accepted obstruction of justice as the type of high crime intended by the Framers to be a basis for impeachment. Nixon resigned from office prior to impeachment. Clinton was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate, which failed to muster the two-thirds majority needed to convict him and remove him from office.