A federal judge in Washington is weighing whether to hold in contempt a veteran journalist who has refused to identify her sources for stories about a Chinese scientist who was investigated by the FBI but never charged.

Donald Trump’s legal team is characterizing his indictment in the special counsel’s 2020 election interference investigation as an attack on the former president’s right to free speech.

But many legal scholars dispute that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech applies to impeachment proceedings at all or that it protects Trump even if it does have some bearing on his impeachment. The trial moved into a question-and-answer session Friday, with final arguments and a vote to follow, possibly as early as Saturday. The reason for this, they wrote, is that the First Amendment is invoked to argue that speech can't somehow be unlawful. The legal issue is whether Trump in his speech incited violence that took place at the Capitol and whether he knew his words would have that effect. Trump's lawyers say the exhortation to “fight like hell” and other comments were figures of speech not meant to be taken literally.

FILE - This July 24, 2020, file photo shows Michael Cohen, center, President Donald Trump's former personal attorney, returning to his apartment, in New York, after being released from prison. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)NEW YORK When Michael Cohen testified before Congress last year, Republican lawmakers worried aloud that President Donald Trump's former fixer would parlay the spectacle and his criminal exploits into a bestseller. It pains me that we are sitting here adding another chapter to his book," said Rep. Carol Miller of West Virginia. The New York Attorney General's Office declined to comment. Cohen was released to home confinement in July and the government lifted a ban on him speaking publicly.