The Department of Justice said that it needs more time to finalize its plea agreement with Boeing, and one lawyer believes the company has a hand in the delayed proceedings.
On Thursday, the DOJ said it was working “expeditiously” to file the plea deal, and had made “substantial progress” in finalizing the agreement with the aerospace company.
However, while the pair had planned to file the agreement with the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas on Friday, they now believe this process will drag on into next week.
Erin R. Applebaum, an attorney representing families who lost loved ones in the Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash in 2019, told Newsweek that while she didn’t know the reasons behind the delay, she suspected it was due to the pair working on a more favorable deal for the manufacturer.
“It seems that Boeing and DOJ are working very hard to make sure that the terms and the wording of the plea are acceptable to Boeing,” Applebaum said. “The primary takeaway for me is that if Boeing didn’t have so much influence over the proceedings, the plea would’ve been filed by now.”
“Based on the work that remains to be done, and accounting for the corporate formalities attendant to finalizing the plea agreement, the government expects that the earliest it could file the plea agreement is Wednesday, July 24, 2024,” a status report sent to the Texas court from the DOJ and Boeing read.
The pair did not rule out further delays, and said that they will submit a further status report if unable to meet the updated deadline.
When contacted, the DOJ declined to provide further comment on why the filing did not take place on Friday.
Newsweek has also contacted Boeing for comment on the delayed filing.
On July 7, Boeing agreed in principle to the plea deal with the DOJ.
Boeing now plans to plead guilty to one count of defrauding Federal Aviation Administration officials over flight control software in the 737 MAX that led to the the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash, as well as the Lion Air crash in Indonesia five months earlier, which together killed 346.
Boeing avoided prosecution by agreeing to enforce tighter safety compliance measure.
However, their immunity was revoked in May 2024, when federal prosecutors found that the company had failed to “design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and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.”
Under the terms of the plea deal, the manufacturer will have to pay a $243.6 million financial penalty, undergo three years of probation and safety monitoring, invest at least $455 million in safety initiatives over this period.
Applebaum previously told Newsweek that the families of those killed in the two crashes “vigorously opposed” the terms of the “shameful sweetheart deal.”
On July 16, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor set out an expedited scheduling order for the case.
O’Connor previously said that, once the DOJ files the plea deal, families of those who lost their lives in the two crashes will have seven days to file briefs in opposition to the agreement, after which Boeing and the government will have two weeks to respond.
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