Justice Department pushes Boeing to plead guilty in 737 Max crash case

The Justice Department is pushing Boeing to plead guilty over its involvement in airplane crashes in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019 that killed 346 people, according to attorneys representing the families of crash victims.

Under the deal, the company would plead guilty to one count of fraud, submit to oversight by an independent monitor for three years, and pay additional financial penalties or face trial, according to Paul Cassell, a professor at the University of Utah College of Law and former federal judge who is representing the families.

Prosecutors are expected to formally offer the deal to Boeing to consider, and the company will have until the end of the week to respond.

The company had no comment. The Justice Department declined to comment.

If the company rejects the terms, prosecutors said they will take the case to trial. However, a guilty plea by Boeing could complicate its ability to receive government contracts unless it gets a waiver, which is possible. It is not clear whether the plea agreement includes such language on waivers.

The deal includes just over $487 million in penalties—the statutory maximum—although Boeing would only have to pay half because it is receiving credit for payments it made as part of a previous agreement.

Details of the plea deal was first reported by Reuters.

The agreement drew angry responses and objections from the families of crash victims, who were briefed on Sunday during a two hour call. Many had hoped that new scrutiny of the company’s operations following the midair blowout of a door panel from one of its 737 Max jets in January would prompt the government to prosecute the company and the executives who were at Boeing at the time of the fatal crashes.

“The Justice Department is preparing to offer to Boeing another sweetheart plea deal,” said Cassell. “The deal will not acknowledge, in any way, that Boeing’s crime killed 346 people. The memory of 346 innocents killed by Boeing demands more justice than this.”

“When there is inevitably another Boeing crash and DOJ seeks to assign blame, they will have nowhere to look this time but in the mirror,” said Erin Applebaum, a partner at Kreindler & Kreindler LLP who has worked with Cassell in representing family members.

Last week, federal prosecutors recommended to senior Justice Department officials that Boeing face criminal charges for failing to meet the terms of a January 2021 agreement that would have shielded it from prosecution in connection with those fatal crashes, according to two people familiar with the discussions. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations and cautioned that no final decision had been made.

In May, prosecutors announced Boeing had breached the terms of that 2021 deal, raising the possibility the department would resume its prosecution on a single charge of conspiracy to defraud the government. The department also could negotiate a plea deal, impose stronger federal oversight of the company, or agree to a new deal or extension of the old deal.

Boeing, in a letter sent to the Justice Department in late June, maintained that it has met the conditions of the agreement.

Under terms of that deal, Boeing paid $2.5 billion in penalties, $500 million of which went to the families of victims. Boeing also agreed to strengthen internal systems to detect and report fraud. If the company met the terms of the deal, it would not be criminally prosecuted.

As part of that agreement, Boeing acknowledged two of its technical pilots misled federal regulators about a software system blamed for the crashes. One of those pilots was acquitted by a federal jury in 2022 on charges of lying to the Federal Aviation Administration about changes to the software system. The defense had argued publicly before trial that the pilot, Mark Forkner, was being scapegoated.

The three-year deferred prosecution deal expired just two days after a door panel of an Alaska Airlines 737 jet blew out in midflight in January, which triggered another criminal investigation.

Family members of crash victims were shocked and angered by prosecutors’ decision to allow Boeing to avoid criminal prosecution. Families had not been consulted during the Justice Department’s negotiations with Boeing about the agreement. Many learned the news from media reports.

The relatives, led by Cassell, later sued and won the right to have families considered crime victims. That meant prosecutors are now required to seek families’ input on significant actions related to the case and have met with them several times.

In a court filing last week, the families reiterated their desire that an independent monitor be appointed to oversee Boeing’s operations and asked that Boeing be fined more than $24 billion in additional penalties. They also have pushed the Justice Department to prosecute Boeing and company executives criminally.

“While plea bargaining often occurs in other less serious and weaker cases, in this case, any further concessions to Boeing would be entirely gratuitous and inappropriate,” the families said in a June 19 letter to the department.

Relatives contend that had it not been for the dramatic blowout aboard the California-bound Alaska Airlines flight in January, Boeing likely would have avoided further scrutiny.

Ike Riffel, whose two sons were among the five Americans who died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March 2019, said the January accident, in which no one was seriously injured despite a gaping hole in the fuselage, was “God-sent.”

“It brought this back into public’s view—that nothing had really changed at Boeing,” he told The Washington Post. “There has been a lot of scrutiny, and a lot of new information has been revealed.”

Riffel’s two sons, Melvin, 29, and Bennett, 26, died when the Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed in March 2019 shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport. The pair had been on an around-the-world tour, a bonding trip for the brothers as Melvin prepared to welcome his first child.