The Justice Department will criminally charge Boeing with violating the terms of a previous agreement that allowed the manufacturer to avoid prosecution for two fatal plane crashes in 2018 and 2019, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The Justice Department is giving Boeing a week to plead guilty, according to two people who participated in a call with DOJ officials Sunday night in which the broad outline of the plan was discussed.
Boeing declined to comment on a possible lawsuit or plea agreement. The Justice Department could not be reached for comment Sunday night.
A lawyer for relatives of some of the victims of the Ethiopian crash said the Justice Department’s decision was born out of cowardice.
Robert Clifford, senior partner at the Clifford Law Firm, accused DOJ of giving Boeing a “cute deal” and said the agency is “afraid to prosecute a company they think is too big to fail.”
“The families believe they have been misled for months by a Justice Department that tried to meet with them in various ways and gave the families a chance to speak out, but never had the chance to [intention] “To do something other than punish Boeing while wearing kid gloves,” he told POLITICO on Sunday.
The DOJ’s decision to file charges comes after weeks of deliberations sparked by a wave of new quality control problems at one of the nation’s top manufacturers. It adds a serious element to allegations that Boeing, also a major defense and aerospace contractor for the federal government, has put short-term profits above public safety.
In May, the agency said it believed Boeing had violated a 2021 agreement in which the planemaker agreed to improve its production processes in exchange for deferred prosecution. Boeing has previously denied wrongdoing in the case and said it “has complied with the terms of that agreement.”
The DOJ action puts a heavy weight on Boeing’s neck as it deals with mounting federal probes — including a separate DOJ investigation — and congressional oversight following a high-profile incident earlier this year in which a door plug fell from a flight of Alaska Airlines in the skies over Oregon blew .
Although no one was seriously injured in the incident, it did highlight problems with Boeing’s workhorse 737 MAX passenger jet, and with Boeing’s quality control.
Faulty flight control software on another version of the MAX was blamed for the 2018 and 2019 crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed a total of 346 people. It was not involved in the recent incident aboard Alaska Airlines.
Nadia Milleron, whose daughter Samya Stumo died in the 2019 Syrian Airlines crash, told POLITICO on Sunday that the families’ two-hour phone call with Glenn Leon, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division’s fraud section, was yet another disappointing outcome from the DOJ. She said the families will ask Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas, who is overseeing the case, not to sign the agreement, Milleron said.
“It’s not the Department of Justice – it’s the ‘Department of Corporate Protection,’” Milleron said in an interview. Part of the plea deal, she said, will include a fine, and a mandate for Boeing to have an outside regulator to oversee its work — over which DOJ will have the final say, but which Boeing will ultimately have a say in as well. Will get. .
Boeing “shouldn’t be the one selecting the monitors, right? This is the whole problem with Boeing continuing to monitor itself,” she said.
Boeing was accused of violating the previous agreement. That agreement stipulated that the charges would be dropped after three years if the company met a number of conditions. These included setting up a program that would flag any evidence of fraud by Boeing employees, by agents acting on behalf of the company to regulators at home or abroad, or by airlines that were Boeing customers.
But earlier this year, the Justice Department said that Boeing could indeed “be prosecuted” because the company failed “to design, implement and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent violations of U.S. fraud laws in all of its operations and detect.”
Javier de Luis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s aeronautics and astronautics department — and a member of an FAA-sanctioned panel of experts charged with reviewing Boeing’s safety culture — said Sunday that the question is not whether there should be a trial or a plea agreement, but rather that “the penalties proposed by the Department of Justice are grossly inadequate, both from the perspective of accountability for the crimes committed and from the perspective of acting in the public interest by bringing about a change in Boeing’s behavior.”
De Luis’ sister was killed in the 737 MAX crash in Ethiopia in 2019.
“The penalties proposed here are essentially the same as those proposed under the previous one [agreement] which, as the Alaska Airlines incident demonstrated, “did nothing to enhance the safety of the flying public,” he said in a statement.
