CREATORS: Lincoln Did Not Extol Himself -- He Extolled His Country

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
December 9, 2025

As I listened to the news that the National Park Service will cut Martin Luther King's Birthday and Juneteenth, two holidays honoring Black history, from its list of free park entrance days and replace them with President Donald Trump's birthday, I was struck, once again, by an aging duplicate of Francis Bicknell Carpenter's "First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln" hanging on my office wall.

The 1864 painting depicts former President Abraham Lincoln sitting in his office with members of his cabinet. It is a stark reminder today of "the better angels of our nature."

Those men with Lincoln — Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War; Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury; Gideon Wells, Secretary of the Navy; Caleb B. Smith, Secretary of the Interior; William H. Seward, Secretary of State; Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General and Edward Bates, Attorney General — were, as Doris Kearns Goodwin proclaimed, a "Team of Rivals."

The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by Abraham Lincoln in the fall of 1862 that took effect on Jan. 1, 1863. In this, the twilight of 2025, we would do well to remember what Lincoln did over 160 years ago.

Some say as a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation sat in his desk, Lincoln wrote a letter to Horace Greeley the editor of the New York Tribune, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union ... If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."

Initially, Lincoln's advisors were not in support of the Emancipation Proclamation. When Lincoln first proposed the idea, many of his cabinet secretaries were concerned that the Proclamation was too radical.

During the meeting depicted in Carpenter's painting, Secretary of War Stanton brought up the idea of arming the freed slaves. Lincoln was thinking of something bigger. He rose, turned to his Cabinet and told them that he had prepared a draft of a proclamation that would free all of the slaves in the Confederate States.

Stanton and Bates supported Lincoln's idea. Seward and Chase were reluctant and Blair was opposed. Welles and Smith apparently remained silent.

Seward suggested waiting for a Union victory to legitimize the Union's authority to issue such a far-reaching order. The Battle of Antietam was the "victory" Lincoln was looking for. He issued the Proclamation just five days after the battle.

The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the Ten Confederate States still fighting the Civil War. Interestingly, the Proclamation did not outlaw slavery or free the slaves in the Union states that still permitted it.

Important for the war effort, the Proclamation prevented European forces from intervening in the war on behalf of the Confederacy. The proclamation made the abolition of slavery a goal of the war. Most European countries had abolished slavery and were squeamish about slavery in the Confederacy.

Setting aside Trump's vainglory, his administration is literally trying to rewrite history. From taking down materials mentioning slavery at national parks, museums, classrooms and as The New York Times suggests, working "to erase or play down black history" — their work is in stark contrast to the work of Lincoln and his administration so many years ago

President Lincoln anticipated that the Emancipation Proclamation would be the most important aspect of his legacy. "I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper," he declared. "If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Florida carries out it 18th execution of 2025

The 45th Execution of 2025

Mark Allen Geralds, convicted of fatally stabbing a woman during a home invasion decades ago was executed December 9, 2025 n Florida, reported The Associated Press.

Geralds, 58, was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison for the February 1989 murder of Tressa Pettibone. The execution was the 18th in Florida this year, further extending the state record for total executions in a single year with one more planned next week.

Asked if he had any last words, Geralds addressed someone by name, but the name was inaudible. He said, “I’m sorry that I missed you.” He then added, “I loved you every day.”

Once the drugs began flowing, he took about a dozen deep breaths. His body then quivered and twitched, his mouth opening and closing. Within three or four minutes, Geralds became still.

After the execution was carried out, a victim advocate from the state attorney’s office read a statement on behalf of the Pettibone family. It said the family has “endured so much as this long legal journey has seemed unending at times.”

“Tomorrow, when we wake up, it will be the first time in nearly 37 years that we don’t have to worry about another appeal being filed or another law changing that could potentially thwart the justice we have been fighting so hard for for so long,” the family said.

Florida Department of Corrections spokesperson Jordan Kirkland said eight people associated with Pettibone were at the prison for the execution, but it was not clear how many of them were in the room as witnesses. None of them directly addressed reporters.

Pettibone was attacked in her Panama City home on Feb. 1, 1989. Later that day, her 8-year-old son arrived home from school and found his mother fatally stabbed on the kitchen floor, according to court records. Geralds was a carpenter who had previously done remodeling work at the home about a year before.

About a week before the killing, Geralds ran into Pettibone and her two children at a shopping mall, and Pettibone mentioned that her husband was away on business. Later Geralds approached Pettibone’s son at the video arcade and asked when the boy’s father would return and what time he and his sister left for and returned from school each day, according to the records.

Investigators found that Geralds had subsequently pawned jewelry with traces of Pettibone’s blood on it, and plastic ties used to bind Pettibone matched ties found in Geralds’ car, the records showed.

Geralds was convicted of murder, armed robbery and other charges and sentenced to death in 1990. The Florida Supreme Court later vacated the sentence but affirmed the conviction, and Geralds was resentenced to death in 1992.

After a death warrant was signed last month and his execution date set, Geralds told a judge he did not wish to pursue any further appeals. The judge signed off on that decision.

Pettibone’s family described her in their statement as “a faithful wife, loving mother, daughter, sister, aunt and dedicated friend.” Her family “was her world, and everything she did centered around them.”

They recalled her love for the holiday season, describing her as a “Christmas nut” who decorated the house with lights, multiple trees and “ornate Santa Clauses and reindeer” and baked cookies, bread, cakes and pies. She enjoyed making gifts, and her family said they still display her handmade crafts every year.

Pettibone “was a wonderful person with a family and many friends who loved her dearly,” the statement said. “Today we crossed the finish line for her, and we close this very painful chapter in our lives.”

Including Tuesday’s execution, a total of 45 men have died by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S., with a handful of executions scheduled in what remains of the year.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, the last highest previous annual total of Florida executions was eight in 2014. Florida has executed more people than any other state this year. Another execution is planned next week in the state under death warrants signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Frank Athen Walls, 58, is scheduled for Florida’s 19th execution this year on Dec. 18. He was convicted of fatally shooting a man and woman during a home invasion robbery and later confessing to three other killings.

Florida executions are by lethal injection using a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the state Department of Corrections.

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SCOTUS returns to death penalty and intellectual disability 23 years after landmark decision

In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment bars the execution of people who are intellectually disabled. On Dec. 10, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Hamm v. Smith on how and whether courts should assess a defendant’s claim under Atkins when he has taken multiple IQ tests, reported SCOTUSblog. The state of Alabama contends that the lower court, in throwing out Joseph Smith’s death sentence, focused too heavily on the individual results of each of Smith’s five IQ tests, when the cumulative effect of his IQ scores indicates that he is not intellectually disabled. Smith counters that the lower court did not rely on “a single IQ score” to reach its conclusion and instead looked at a broad array of evidence.

Smith was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 robbery and murder of Durk Van Dam. The case’s path to the justices has been a complicated one. Smith’s efforts to appeal his sentence and then seek post-conviction relief were unsuccessful in the state courts. He then went to federal court in Mobile, Alabama, where Senior U.S. District Judge Callie V.S. Granade threw out his sentence. In May 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld Granade’s decision.    

The state then went to the Supreme Court, which considered the case at 22 consecutive conferences before ultimately sending it back to the 11th Circuit in November 2024 for the lower court to clarify its ruling. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch indicated then that they would have taken up the case and heard oral arguments then, without waiting for the lower court to reconsider it. 

The case returned to the court of appeals, which once again concluded that Smith’s death sentence should be set aside. Smith had obtained five IQ scores, ranging from 72 to 78, and his intellectual-disability claim hinged in part on whether his IQ was 70 or lower. The 11th Circuit stressed that it had not thrown out Smith’s death sentence simply because the margin of error for his lowest IQ score (72) would put his IQ at 69. Instead, it said, it had upheld the district court’s ruling in Smith’s favor “based on the complete record, including any relevant expert testimony.” The district court, the 11th Circuit stressed, was not clearly wrong (the standard for reviewing factual findings by the district court) when it found “that Smith suffered from significantly subaverage intellectual function, that he had significant and substantial deficits in adaptive behavior, and that he manifested those qualities before he turned 18.”

In February, the state asked the Supreme Court to intervene for a second time. In a brief, unsigned order in early June, the justices agreed to do so. They framed the question before them as “[w]hether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores in assessing” a claim that a capital defendant is intellectually disabled and therefore cannot be executed. 

In its brief on the merits, the state told the justices that in Atkins, the court observed that “state laws ‘generally’ immunize offenders known to have an IQ under 70,” but it did not provide any additional guidance on how broadly it applies. Since there are no Supreme Court cases governing this issue, Smith must show that there is a national consensus among the states that someone in his position cannot be executed. But there is no such consensus, because “the States have not coalesced around a single legislative approach to multiple IQ scores.” “If there is anything resembling a norm,” the state contended, “it is one that rejects Smith’s logic that ‘scores within the 70 to 75 range,’” standing alone, are enough to show that he has “significantly subaverage intellectual functioning (an IQ of 70 or below),” as Alabama law requires.

Alabama acknowledged that “some States have restricted the consideration of multiple IQ scores.” But, it cautioned, even those states do not agree on “how it should be done.” Although some states look at the lowest IQ score, it noted, others “have assigned greater weight to an offender’s highest score.”

But in any event, the state continued, the Supreme Court “can decline to expand the Eighth Amendment if it has ‘reason’ not to constitutionalize prevailing standards.” And in this case, it argued, nothing in the text or history of the Eighth Amendment requires the justices to adopt a rule “denying the cumulative effect of IQ scores.” The purpose of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the state wrote, was “to proscribe punishments ‘calculated to superadd terror, pain, or disgrace.’ But the point of considering IQ scores together is not to inflict suffering without penological reason, but to decide whether Smith qualifies for Atkins relief.”

Under the Eighth Amendment, the state wrote, federal courts should also “presume[] that a state sentence is ‘valid[].’” This deference is especially important in a case like this one, it added, because “‘[p]sychiatry is not … an exact science,’” and scientific standards are often subject to change.

At a minimum, the state concluded, Smith’s score of 78 on one IQ test forecloses his argument that he is intellectually disabled. “The Eighth Amendment,” it said, “does not bar the execution of a murderer who has a valid IQ score with a 95% confidence interval wholly above 70.”

The Trump administration filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting Alabama. “Similar to polling in an election,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote, “multiple IQ test scores often produce a more accurate image than any single test score does in isolation. And nothing in this Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence compels that courts blind themselves from looking at that complete picture, or forbids governments from setting up frameworks that require courts to perform such an analysis.”

In his brief on the merits, Smith contended that it is “undisputed” “that courts should assess multiple IQ scores holistically. The only dispute,” he wrote, “is whether that assessment should end, as [the state] suggests, with simply tallying up IQ scores above (and presumably also below) a certain threshold, or whether holistically assessing a person’s intellectual functioning in light of multiple IQ scores requires considering those scores in light of other evidence—particularly expert testimony—regarding the scores’ validity and meaning, and other evidence of the claimant’s intellectual functioning.” Both Alabama law and the Supreme Court’s decisions interpreting the Eighth Amendment, he argued, point to the latter option, which is “precisely” what the lower courts did.

Both of those courts, Smith emphasized, determined that it was “not clear,” based solely on his IQ scores, whether he “has substantially subaverage intellectual functioning.” Therefore, he said, they also looked at “‘additional evidence’” that would help them to make that determination, such as “neuropsychological testing and other evidence bearing on intellectual functioning, including, for example, Smith’s behavioral history, school records, and tests assessing verbal abstract reasoning skills, vocabulary, and other tests ‘correlated with intelligence.’”

This approach, Smith continued, is consistent with those of virtually all states, with the exception of Oklahoma, whose state laws “do not require courts to apply categorical rules when faced with multiple IQ scores, instead delegating to the fact finder the task of weighing all relevant evidence.” It is “also consistent with the standards employed by clinicians and diagnosticians,” he wrote. Moreover, he added, contrary to the state’s contention that medical standards can and do change, the “essential” factors that the medical community uses to diagnose an intellectual disability “‘have not changed significantly over the last 60 years.’”

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SCOTUS will hear challenge to limits of executive power today

Today the Supreme Court will consider whether President Trump can fire independent government officials despite laws meant to protect them from politics, a major test for the justices to determine how far to expand presidential power, reports The New York Times.

The justices are being asked to overturn a landmark decision from 1935, which said that Congress could put limits on the president’s authority to remove some executive branch officials.

In recent rulings, the court’s conservative majority signaled that it was receptive to Mr. Trump’s claims that a president should not be forced to delegate authority to agency heads at odds with his agenda.

A decision in the president’s favor would call into question the constitutionality of job protections extended to more than two dozen other agencies Congress has charged with protecting consumers, workers and the environment — and potentially upend the fundamental structure of the modern government.

Since returning to the White House, Mr. Trump has fired government watchdogs, leaders of independent agencies and rank-and-file federal workers, drawing multiple legal challenges.

The Supreme Court has generally allowed the firings to take effect through temporary emergency orders. Monday’s case, involving the Federal Trade Commission, presents the first opportunity for the court to issue a conclusive ruling on the underlying legal questions of Mr. Trump’s firings.

Next month, the justices will separately consider whether the president has the power to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Board governor. The justices have allowed Ms. Cook to remain in her post for now, signaling that the central bank may be uniquely insulated from presidential interference because of its history.

At issue on Monday is Mr. Trump’s firing in March of Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic member of the F.T.C. The president said he was removing her because she did not align with his agenda, despite a law that says the president can remove commissioners only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Ms. Slaughter promptly sued.

Congress intentionally created such bipartisan commissions — made up of experts who could not be fired by the president without cause — to ensure that policy decisions would be made free from politics.

The F.T.C., created in 1914, protects consumers from deceptive practices and monopoly power. It is led by five commissioners who serve staggered seven-year terms; no more than three can be members of the same party.

The F.T.C. has been led by only Republicans since March, after Mr. Trump fired a second Democrat, Alvaro Bedoya. After initially challenging his firing, Mr. Bedoya resigned, citing financial pressures.

A district court judge said in July that Ms. Slaughter’s firing was illegal, and in early September, a divided court panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reinstated her.

That court said that a commissioner could not be fired without the required grounds of “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” The panel pointed to the job protections upheld by the 1935 decision that also involved a fired F.T.C. commissioner.

In that decision, Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the court unanimously upheld removal restrictions for government officials on multimember boards. The justices in that case said President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not remove a member of the F.T.C. merely because of political differences.

But in the last 15 years, the court has repeatedly narrowed that decision to give the president more control over executive officials.

“Since 1789, the Constitution has been understood to empower the president to keep these officers accountable — by removing them from office, if necessary,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in 2010.

More recently, the court found that the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional because it did not allow the president to fire its single director without cause. The court allowed the job protections to remain for multimember bodies like the F.T.C.

But in its emergency orders issued this year, the conservative majority has let the president temporarily remove leaders of agencies led by such multimember boards, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

As a result, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, suggested in court filings that the precedent at issue was already a “dead letter” that should be overruled. Such tenure protections, he told the court in filings, unconstitutionally infringe on the president’s power to run the executive branch.

In response, Ms. Slaughter’s lawyers have told the court that getting rid of the precedent decades later would “profoundly destabilize institutions that are now inextricably intertwined with the fabric of American governance.”

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Members of Congress want video of boat attack released

Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the two survivors of the Sept. 2 strike on an alleged drug boat “were barely alive, much less engaging in hostilities,” when a follow-up strike took place, reported The New York Times.

 Top military officers briefed Himes and other top lawmakers last week on the Sept. 2 attacks. “When you actually watch the video, you realize they don’t have a radio. They’re barely hanging on and not slipping beneath the waves,” Himes said on Sunday. He called for the public release of the video saying that it was “important that people see what it looks like when the full force of the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under.”

Himes said he was confident in U.S. intelligence that said the boat was involved in drug trafficking, but said he did not believe the Trump administration knew the identify of all 11 people killed in the Sept. 2 boat strikes, which began a campaign of at least 21 similar attacks in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

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Brooklyn woman with mental health problems remains in jail uncharged for not revealing whereabouts of missing child

The Family Court in this case is doing precisely what the constitutional guarantee against compelled self-incrimination forbids: It is exerting the court’s coercive power to force Ms. Pritchett to give testimony that could expose her to criminal prosecution

On Thursday, the Brooklyn Family Court judge asked the woman the question for the seventh time:

Where was Jacob?

Jacob Pritchett, an 11-year-old so small that his neighbors in Brooklyn thought he was no older than 7, had not been seen for months. The police and a child welfare case worker, prompted by a call to 911, had gone to his Brownsville apartment on Oct. 1 to find him. But the woman who answered the door, Jacqueline Pritchett, told them she had never had a child, reported The New York Times.

The apartment was spotless and had the pungent scent of cleaning products, and the police could see toys in the bathroom and in the closet, according to court transcripts. But Ms. Pritchett, 50, continued repeating her claim even after Judge Dawn Marie Orsatti issued a civil warrant on Oct. 10, charging her with contempt for not revealing where her boy was, and sent her to Rikers Island.

Ms. Pritchett has been brought back to court repeatedly, and on Thursday, Judge Orsatti tried again.

“If you tell the court the whereabouts of Jacob, I will release you from incarceration,” Judge Orsatti said.

Ms. Pritchett, dressed in brown sweatpants and sweatshirt, sat next to her lawyer and looked back silently. Her lawyer, Daniela Mancini, leaned over and said her client was invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Judge Orsatti sent Ms. Pritchett back to Rikers.

The case has flummoxed detectives who scoured three months of surveillance footage taken from the building, looking for any sign of the boy. They traveled 330 miles to upstate New York to search a landfill where the garbage from the Brooklyn building was taken. They have interviewed neighbors and relatives, but no one has been able to help them figure out where Jacob, whom the police and neighbors have described as nonverbal, could be.

The answer appears to lie with Ms. Pritchett, but she has resisted giving one despite the efforts of the court, the police and the city’s Administration for Children’s Services.

Brooklyn Defender Services, the public defenders representing Ms. Pritchett, declined to comment about the boy’s disappearance or whether his mother knew anything about it. It has filed court papers arguing that she should be released immediately from Rikers Island, calling her detention a “constitutional violation.”

”The Family Court in this case is doing precisely what the constitutional guarantee against compelled self-incrimination forbids: It is exerting the court’s coercive power to force Ms. Pritchett to give testimony that could expose her to criminal prosecution,” wrote Brian A. Holbrook, a lawyer for Brooklyn Defenders, in a Dec. 2 petition.

It is unclear whether Jacob went to school. Before this fall, Ms. Pritchett did not appear to have a history of involvement with child welfare agencies in New York State, according to someone who viewed some of her social service records and spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

The police once made a check on Jacob in 2017 after a 911 call, according to court transcripts. The Police Department said it is continuing to investigate the case.

The 911 call that sent the police and A.C.S. to the Brownsville address this fall came from a worried neighbor, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case who was not authorized to discuss it.

Police officers went to the apartment in a three-story red brick building on Howard Avenue on Oct. 1 for a wellness check.

Ms. Pritchett told officers that she lived alone and “became loud and boisterous during the interview,” according to an internal police document.

During a hearing on Oct. 10, an A.C.S. caseworker, Gabriel Martindale, said that when he and the police arrived, he went inside and saw two mattresses. The apartment was dark and the electricity had been shut off.

The smell of cleaning products, he said, was “very strong.”

When Mr. Martindale asked whether the toys belonged to Jacob, Ms. Pritchett said they were hers. He then presented her with Jacob’s birth certificate and asked whether that was her son.

“She said she’s never had a child, that she has never had a period, that she’s never been with a man,” Mr. Martindale said. She then said “that she is Jesus Christ.”

Ms. Pritchett was taken to Brookdale University Hospital nearby for psychiatric evaluation. Neighbors said they had seen the police checking the building’s dumpsters. A police dog that later searched the apartment “got a hit” from the refrigerator inside the kitchen, the internal document stated.

On Oct. 9, the police were in Perinton, N.Y., near Rochester. Wearing white coveralls, they fanned out across the High Acres Landfill. The official said investigators went there after they learned the garbage collected at the Brooklyn apartment was sent there.

Neighbors said in interviews in October that they had not seen the boy in months, but had noticed that Ms. Pritchett, who had grown thinner, had lesions on her skin and sometimes talked to herself.

Shamik Burchet, who lives in the building and often saw Ms. Pritchett and Jacob, said the child “seemed really neglected.”

When the boy was younger, Mr. Burchet said, his mother sometimes left him sitting in a stroller alone in the building’s lobby.

“Sometimes I’d have to sit with him,” he said. “Eventually she’d come back around.”

Evelyn Rolon, who lives nearby and works as a bartender, said the mother and son moved into the building about seven years ago.

“I would hate to think that a mom would hurt her own child,” said Ms. Rolon, 49, who often saw Ms. Pritchett and her son. “I’m hoping she gave him to somebody because she got overwhelmed.”

Sometimes, Ms. Pritchett would meet neighbors at block parties. The boy was usually not with her, but at a cookout in early September, Ms. Rolon said she gave the woman two burgers — one for her and one for Jacob.

“He would be making sounds. He wasn’t formulating words,” Ms. Rolon said.

Ms. Pritchett was often seen out alone. Other times, they could hear her screaming at Jacob in the apartment.

“We’d tell her, ‘Stop yelling at the baby like that.’ You know how someone yells at a grown person? That’s how she used to yell at the baby,” Ms. Rolon said. “You could tell she was overwhelmed.”

In October, when officers from the crime scene unit were searching the apartment, they sealed the door with a neon green warning sign that forbade anyone from coming inside without police authorization. Affixed just below that sign were several pink and yellow stickers with happy faces.

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NBC News: Grand jury declines to indict N.Y. Attorney General Letitia James, less than two weeks after the first case was dismissed

The Justice Department failed to secure an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The presentation to the grand jury came less than two weeks after the original criminal case against her was dismissed.

James, a frequent political target of President Donald Trump’s who had successfully brought a fraud lawsuit against him, had previously been indicted by a grand jury on one charge of bank fraud and another of making false statements to a financial institution.

James has denied any wrongdoing. In a statement Thursday in response to reports that a grand jury did not re-indict her she said, "As I have said from the start, the charges against me are baseless. It is time for this unchecked weaponization of our justice system to stop."

"I am grateful to the members of the grand jury and humbled by the support I have received from across the country. Now, I will continue to do my job standing up for the rule of law and the people of New York," James said.

Lindsey Halligan, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and a former personal attorney to Trump with no prior prosecutorial experience, presented the case to a grand jury on her own in the first go-round — and that case was declared void on Nov. 24 when a judge found Halligan’s appointment was unlawful.

The Justice Department initially vowed to appeal the ruling by U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie, but ultimately decided to seek a new, untainted indictment against James, a source familiar with the deliberations told NBC News earlier this week.

The new case was presented to a grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia, by different prosecutors.

The failure to secure an indictment on Thursday does not bar prosecutors from attempting to do so again in the future.

A separate source familiar with the matter said there “should be no premature celebrations.”

The Justice Department does not comment on grand jury matters.

Prosecutors have also been discussing trying to again bring a case against former FBI Director James Comey, who was indicted in October on charges of making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation.

Currie dismissed the case against him on the same day she tossed the case against James on the same grounds.

Trump named Halligan U.S. attorney for the Eastern District on Sept. 20, the day after he forced out his initial pick, Erik Siebert, who resisted pressure to prosecute Comey and James.

The Halligan appointment also came after Trump urged Attorney General Pam Bondi in a social media post to push ahead with prosecutions of Comey, James and another perceived political adversary, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California.

“Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,’” Trump said the post, which a source previously confirmed to NBC News the president had intended as a direct message to Bondi, not a public post.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump continued, while praising Halligan as “a really good lawyer.”

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