David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department and Boeing ( NYSE: ) told a court on Friday they had not reached an agreement on a revised plea deal after a U.S. judge rejected the deal in December, blaming a diversity and inclusion provision.
Boeing and the government “continue to work in good faith toward” the new agreement, they said in a joint filing. They asked U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor to give them until February 16 to submit a new update. That schedule would give President-elect Donald Trump’s administration a chance to consider the issue before moving forward.
In July, Boeing agreed to plead guilty to fraud charges following two fatal 737 MAX crashes. The planemaker also agreed to pay a fine of up to $487.2 million and spend $455 million to improve safety and compliance practices during three years of court-supervised probation as part of the deal.
Judge O’Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, threw out the deal in December, seizing on a sentence in the plea agreement that referenced the DOJ’s diversity policy regarding the selection of an independent monitor to audit the plane maker’s compliance practices.
Relatives of the victims of the two 737 MAX crashes, which occurred in 2018 and 2019 and killed 346 people, called the plea deal a “sweetheart” deal that failed to adequately hold Boeing accountable for the deaths of their loved ones.
An accepted plea deal would make Boeing a convicted felon for conspiring to defraud the US Federal Aviation Administration over problematic software affecting the flight control systems of the planes that crashed.
In May, the DOJ found that Boeing violated the terms of a 2021 agreement that protected it from prosecution over the accidents. Prosecutors then decided to criminally charge Boeing and negotiate the current plea deal.
The decision comes after a door panel on an Alaska Airlines jet exploded in-flight on January 5, 2024, exposing ongoing safety and quality problems at Boeing.
