The U.S. Justice Department on April 24 met with the families of the victims of two fatal Boeing 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 as it considers opening criminal charges against the aviation company.
The Justice Department has until July 7 to decide if Boeing violated its 2021 deferred prosecution agreement that allowed the manufacturer to avoid criminal prosecution if it paid its fines, disclosed any allegations of fraud, abstained from committing felony offenses, and cooperated with the government.
That agreement would have expired on Jan. 7, but two days prior, an Alaskan Airways flight experienced a mid-air blowout of a door plug that forced it to make an emergency landing.
The Justice Department reportedly started an investigation into the incident in early March.
During two separate closed-door meetings, the department met with the families of the victims of Lion Air Flight 610, which crashed in Indonesia in 2018 minutes after takeoff, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET302, which crashed in Ethiopia in 2019, also minutes after takeoff.
The lawyer representing the families, Paul Cassell, is also a law professor at the University of Utah and a former U.S. District Court Judge.
He told The Epoch Times that the Justice Department’s deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing was “very unusual from the outset.”
Mr. Cassell expressed concern over the April 24 meeting and the Justice Department’s seeming unwillingness to press charges against the aviation company.
“Our concerns were not allayed during the meeting; if anything, they were heightened during the meeting because the Justice Department gave us very little information.
“And the little information that we did receive made us very concerned that the department continues to be in bed with Boeing,” he said.
What worries Mr. Cassell is the Justice Department ignoring the “substantial evidence of Boeing’s non-compliance” with its agreement with the government while simultaneously dismissing the families’ pleas.
The Justice Department initially concealed its deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing from the victims’ families, which Mr. Cassell said violates federal law.
The agreement was negotiated during the final days of the Trump administration on Jan. 7, 2021.
However, the Biden administration seems unwilling to treat the aviation company differently than the previous one.
“Unfortunately, the current administration, at every opportunity, has been fighting the victims’ families,” Mr. Cassell explained.
Astonishingly, he said, the department concluded that the families do not represent crime victims.
According to Mr. Cassell, the department claims the only victims of a crime regarding the two fatal 737 MAX crashes were “FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] bureaucrats, who had been deceived by Boeing covering up this defect in its software system, rather than 346 families all over the world who lost loved ones in the crashes.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland was not present at the April 24 meeting.
Glenn Leon, the chief of the fraud section of the Justice Department’s criminal division, led the morning meeting with the victims’ families and their legal counsel.
The agreement between Boeing and the government is also unusual because of the “exoneration provision” that the Justice Department included, Mr. Cassell said.
It’s normal for a deferred prosecution agreement to include the party—in this case, Boeing’s—guilt regarding the crimes it allegedly committed.
However, a line in the agreement seemingly exonerated Boeing’s management by saying they were “not deeply involved in the crime that was being committed,” he added.
“And that’s just extraordinary.”
“The Justice Department doesn’t run around exonerating people; it either files charges against someone or does not.
“So there’s just been a whole series of unusual things about this [agreement] that has now been proven to have been illegally negotiated that continues to raise questions for the families that I represent,” Mr. Cassell added.
He questions whether Boeing is getting “preferential treatment” from the Justice Department because the company is a long-running government contractor.
Even if the department opts to uphold its agreement with Boeing and files a motion to dismiss the criminal charges against the company in the Fort Worth Division of the Northern District of Texas on July 7, it won’t stop Mr. Cassell and the victims’ families.
“We will be there on July 8 opposing that motion with every argument we can make,” he remarked.
Previously, in December 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Fifth Circuit ruled that the families have the right to object to any dismissal of the charges against Boeing.
“So we will be fighting on the beaches; we will be fighting every way possible to avoid dismissal of these charges against Boeing.
“We don’t understand how it could possibly be in the public interest to dismiss the charges and avoid a trial that could shed light on so many of the safety issues that continue to surface regarding the 737 max that’s made by Boeing,” Mr. Cassell added.
The Epoch Times reached out to Boeing and the Justice Department for comment.
