DOJ readying criminal charges against Boeing for prior deadly 737 MAX crashes

The Justice Department will criminally charge Boeing for violating the 
terms of a prior 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.

DOJ will give Boeing a week to either plead guilty or risk a trial, 
according to two people who participated in a Sunday evening call with DOJ 
officials who discussed the contours of the plan.

Boeing declined to comment on any potential trial or plea agreement. The 
Justice Department could not be reached for comment Sunday evening.

An attorney for family members of some of those lost in the crash in 
Ethiopia suggested DOJ’s decision was born of cowardice.

Robert Clifford, senior partner at the Clifford Law Firm, accused DOJ of 
giving Boeing a “sweetheart deal” and said the agency is “afraid to 
prosecute a company that they believe is too big to fail.”

“The families believe that they have been misled for months by a DOJ that 
went through the motions to meet with them and let the families speak up, 
but never having the [intention] to do anything other than punish Boeing 
while wearing kid gloves,” he told POLITICO on Sunday.

DOJ’s decision to pursue charges comes after weeks of deliberations, 
kicked off by a spate of new quality control problems at one of the United 
States’ most important manufacturers. It adds a grave element to 
accusations that Boeing, also a major defense and aerospace contractor for 
the federal government, has put short-term profits ahead of public safety.

In May the agency said it believed Boeing had violated the 2021 agreement, 
in which the planemaker agreed to improve its manufacturing processes in 
exchange for deferred prosecution. Boeing has previously denied any 
wrongdoing in the matter, previously stating it’s “honored the terms of 
that agreement.”

The DOJ action places a major weight on Boeing’s neck as it navigates 
mounting federal probes — including a separate one from DOJ — and 
congressional scrutiny following a high-profile incident earlier this year 
in which a door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines flight midair over 
Oregon.

Though nobody was seriously injured in that incident, it drew heightened 
attention to problems with its workhorse 737 MAX passenger jet, and with 
Boeing’s quality control.

Faulty flight control software on another version of the MAX had been 
blamed in the 2018 and 2019 crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, which 
killed a total of 346 people. It has not been implicated in the recent 
incident on board Alaska Airlines.

Nadia Milleron, whose daughter Samya Stumo died in the Ethiopian Airlines 
crash in 2019, told POLITICO on Sunday that the two-hour phone call 
families had with Glenn Leon, head of DOJ’s Fraud Section of its Criminal 
Division, was once again a disappointing result from DOJ. She said the 
families will petition 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 protecting 
corporations,’” Milleron said in an interview. Part of the plea deal, she 
said, will include a fine, and the mandate for Boeing to have a third-
party monitor to oversee its work — which DOJ will have final say over, 
but that Boeing will ultimately get a say in, too.

Boeing “shouldn’t be the ones selecting the monitors, right? This is the 
whole problem that Boeing keeps monitoring itself,” she said.

In the previous agreement Boeing is accused of violating, charges were to 
be dismissed after three years if the company met several conditions, 
including creating a program that would flag any hint of fraud by Boeing 
employees, by agents acting on the company’s behalf before regulators 
foreign or domestic, or by any of Boeing’s airline customers.

But earlier this year, DOJ said Boeing is indeed “subject to prosecution” 
because it failed to “design, implement, and enforce a compliance and 
ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the U.S. fraud laws 
throughout its operations.”

Javier de Luis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s department 
of aeronautics and astronautics — and a member of an FAA-sanctioned expert 
review panel tasked with reviewing Boeing’s safety culture — on Sunday 
said the issue isn’t whether there should be a trial or a plea deal, but 
rather that “the penalties being proposed by the DOJ are totally 
inadequate both from the perspective of accountability for the crimes 
committed and from the perspective of acting in the public interest by 
ensuring a change in Boeing’s behavior.”

De Luis’ sister died during the 737 MAX crash in Ethiopia in 2019.

“The penalties proposed here are essentially the same as those proposed 
under the previous [agreement] which” as the Alaska Airlines incident 
demonstrated, “did nothing to increase the safety of the flying public,” 
he said in a statement.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/30/doj-criminal-charges-boeing-
00165992