The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee wants to convince the public that he is not on an inevitable path to impeaching the president of the United States.

“We do not now have the evidence all sorted out to do an impeachment,” Jerry Nadler told ABC’s “This Week.” “Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American people that it ought to happen.” Irrefutable evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” he said, would convince supporters of President Donald Trump that this is not just a partisan effort to overturn the election.

“Yeah, it is a high bar,” Nadler said. “We may or may not get there.”

In that same interview, however, Nadler offered a less tentative judgment. It is, he said, “very clear that the president obstructed justice”—the very term used in the impeachment efforts against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. And last month he delivered a starker assessment of the President.