In an intriguing development, the Department of Justice, under U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, attempted to keep the Trump administration’s recent failure to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James confidential, even though the public had learned of it a day earlier, as revealed by a U.S. magistrate judge’s order.

The government’s effort to file an additional felony charge against James for making false statements, initially reported by Politico, highlighted the gap between the high-profile “no true bill” finding and the DOJ’s tardy attempt to keep the setback under wraps.

On November 24, James, alongside former FBI Director James Comey, managed to have a federal indictment dismissed. They argued that Bondi had unlawfully appointed Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Both James, accused of bank fraud, and Comey, accused of lying to Congress, claimed that the DOJ’s actions were driven by vindictive and selective prosecution, suggesting that President Donald Trump was seeking “revenge.”

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles perhaps captured James’ perspective best in a Vanity Fair article that garnered significant attention this week, pointing out that the prosecution might be Trump’s attempt at retribution.

“Well, that might be the one retribution,” Wiles reportedly said of the James case, as payback for the civil fraud case the Democratic AG brought against Trump to, as Wiles put it, take “half a billion dollars of his money!”

James’ lawyer Abbe Lowell immediately responded, essentially thanking Wiles for making his point for him by “admitting that President Trump turned the Justice Department into his weapon for political retribution” to launch an “improper vindictive prosecution.”

“It all proves beyond any doubt that the attempts to bring charges against Attorney General James are nothing more than Trump’s political crusade,” Lowell reportedly said. “When they admit it’s not justice they’re after but pure revenge, believe them.”

In the weeks since the dismissal of the initial case, the DOJ tried twice more over a 7-day span to secure mortgage fraud indictments against the New York AG, but in neither instance did a grand jury return a true bill on the charges.

Politico now reports on the third attempt, the DOJ actually tried to ratchet up the case by adding a third felony charge against James — a second count for allegedly lying to a financial institution.

Worse yet for the DOJ, a U.S. magistrate judge declined at the start of this week to keep that already publicly reported failure out of public view.

U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter, the Monday order shows, noted that the grand jury returned a “no true bill” for James on Dec. 11 and the DOJ waited until the next day to file a motion to “Prohibit Disclosure of the Foreperson’s Notice of a No True Bill and the returned no true bill,” well after reports swirled of the no bill in the media.

The DOJ, with Halligan, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McBride, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Keller on the filing, specifically asked the court to “impound and seal the documents.” But the proverbial horse was already out of the barn.

“[T]he grand jury included the no bill in its returns to the Court on the record, and the government made no attempt to seal this information until the next day. The dispositive fact is that the public already knew about the grand jury’s decision before the government filed its Motion to Seal,” the magistrate said. “On December 11, 2025, at 4:06 p.m.—more than a half hour before the grand jury handed up the no true bill in open court at 4:39 p.m.—ABC News published an article stating, ‘For a second time in recent days, a federal grand jury in Virginia has refused to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud, sources said.’ ABC News, 2nd grand jury refuses to indict New York AG Letitia James: Sources[.]”

“Because the public already had access to the grand jury’s decision on the no bill before the grand jury returned it in open court, no basis exists to seal this information now,” Porter explained, calling that quest “essentially futile” in “this age of electronic filing.”