President Trump’s Justice Department is weighing whether to let Boeing (BA) out of a criminal trial and guilty plea surrounding two fatal 737 Max 8 crashes, and some family members of the crash victims are not happy about it.
They say they view it as a sweetheart deal for the aviation giant at the expense of justice and safety.
“The message that is sent to corporate America is: Don’t worry about killing your customers,” said Dr. Javier de Luis, a retired aerospace engineer and MIT lecturer whose sister, Graziella de Luis y Ponce, an interpreter, died in one of the crashes. “Just treat it as a cost of doing business.”
In a 2024 criminal guilty plea deal reached with President Biden’s DOJ, Boeing admitted that its workers conspired to defraud aviation regulators before the crashes killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.
Now the idea being considered by the DOJ, according to prosecutors and family members who participated in a call with DOJ officials last Friday, is to offer Boeing protection from prosecution in exchange for an additional $444.5 million from the company, to be divided between impacted families.
The “non-prosecution” agreement would end the criminal fraud charges renewed after prosecutors revoked a prior deferred prosecution agreement they reached with Boeing in January 2021.
Boeing declined to comment on the proposal. A trial is set to begin on June 23.
The government said in an update on the case published May 19 that Boeing would also be required to pay the maximum fine allowed by law, pay for compliance improvements, and retain an independent compliance consultant, but that it had not decided on whether to enter the proposed agreement.
The DOJ also said during the call with victims’ families that it had not reached a final decision on the proposal.
Avoiding a criminal conviction would be a major victory for the company and would re-insulate Boeing from a criminal fraud trial for a third time, most recently after a federal judge ordered a trial to begin in June.
Criminal convictions can foreclose or suspend a company’s right to contract with the federal government and frustrate its ability to secure loans.
Those consequences have particular meaning for Boeing, which counts the federal government as its largest customer and also happens to be the country’s largest exporter.
Earlier this year, Boeing won a major contract to build a new F-47 jet fighter for the Pentagon. Last week, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg accompanied Trump on a trip to the Middle East and thanked the president for helping to broker a $96 billion order from Qatar Airways.
Sitting next to the president at an event, he said, “All of these aircraft will be built in the United States, creating a significant number of jobs.”
‘There is no judicial oversight’
Tracy Brammeier, a crash victims’ lawyer from Clifford Law Offices, said the current plan being considered by the DOJ is the most lenient bargain yet and would reward Boeing with less accountability for its repeated breaches.
She added that a trial, on the other hand, could expose who at the company is responsible for the deaths of her clients.
“When it comes to a non-prosecution agreement, there is no judicial oversight. It’s truly a private agreement,” Brammeier said. “With a deferred prosecution agreement, it’s truly deferred, so there’s a time period where Boeing still has to answer to a judge.”
“You had a criminal who said, ‘I want to plead guilty to a crime.’ And now all of the sudden, six or seven months later, the government is saying we just decided that they can pay [millions] and we’re going to drop the case,” Brammeier added.
Matthew Yelovich, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner in Cleary Gottlieb’s white collar criminal practice, said the DOJ has likely settled on the agreement’s core terms.
“By the time the government has reached the point where it’s inviting the victims to weigh in on a resolution of this size and complexity, the idea that the government would just abandon it altogether doesn’t occur very frequently,” Yelovich said.
What the government flagged for the victims as its preferred approach, he said, is most likely the substance of what it will present to the court.
Court approval is required for the DOJ to dismiss the charges. However, because judges have limited discretion to overstep the government’s prosecutorial discretion, it’s rare for such a request to be denied.
Another family member of victims who is not happy with what is now under consideration is Ike Riffel, who lost two sons, Melvin, 29, and Bennett, 26, in Ethiopian Airlines’ Boeing 737 Max crash of 2019.
The government’s latest proposal, he said, leaves no path for families to uncover who specifically at Boeing knew about the 737 Max’s deficiencies.
“We’ve lost any other options that we have,” Riffel said, adding that the government’s prosecution of Boeing’s test pilot on multiple counts of fraud ended in acquittal. “What I’d like to see is a public trial. Who did what? Who said what? Which executives were in on this whole conspiracy?”
“I want Boeing to get back to the gold standard of engineering and safety,” Riffel said. “There are a lot of great people we know that work for Boeing that knew nothing about it. No one wants to see Boeing fail. We just want to get the rats out of the cellar.”
That’s reason enough for the judge to reject the deal, he added. “Hopefully, he’ll see through this — that they’re dangling money in our face.”
‘My sons never had a chance’
Yelovich agreed that a trial generally brings more to light.
“One of the great hallmarks of our system of public trials is the participation of the public in the criminal justice system,” Yelovich said. “It’s not just the right of the government to put on the full force of its evidence, but also for the public to have visibility into the charges, the evidence, and the defenses that might otherwise not be reflected in a resolution agreement.”
Bremmeier said the families reason that their objection to another trial-evading agreement will enhance flight safety. Boeing is still recovering from another near-fatal aircraft failure in January 2024, when a door plug blew off a Boeing-made 737 Max 9 flown by Alaska Airlines.
“The door plug incident a year and a half ago is a really good example of that,” she said. “It’s unrelated to MCAS. It’s unrelated to the crashes that they were victimized by.”
Riffel said he pleaded with the government’s lawyers during Friday’s call to reconsider.
“I ask that the DOJ tear this agreement up and reopen the investigation,” he said. “People committed these crimes, not a corporation … If this non-prosecution agreement is accepted, the truth will never be known, and I believe that the truth is very important to help make sure that this never happens again.”
“The DOJ is giving Boeing another chance; my sons never had a chance.”
De Luis said the victims proposed that Boeing make a much more significant monetary contribution in the “single-digit billions” of dollars.
The funds, he said, would be used entirely to employ external safety monitors on Boeing’s factory floors for five years. Monitors are needed, he said, because in his opinion, the FAA is not currently equipped to fully oversee manufacturing safety.
“People say Boeing is too big to fail. Yes, but it’s also too big to produce unsafe airplanes,” de Luis said. “We need them to do better. And they have proven time and time again that left to their own devices, they will not do better.”
Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on X @alexiskweed.
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