Boeing has been all over the headlines here at Not the Bee for their ongoing safety issues.
And the crazy part is that Boeing was under an agreement with the DOJ to clean up its act during the duration of all of those issues we reported.
The agreement was reached after the Boeing 737 crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.
Those crashes occurred because Boeing employees misled federal aviation inspectors regarding the safety of the 737s, and they accepted a deferred prosecution agreement (DFA) with the DOJ, which involved paying millions of fines and making changes to their business to prevent fraud.
However, the DOJ says that Boeing violated the terms of that agreement. While they have not released any specifics, U.S. prosecutors said,
Boeing had violated the deferred prosecution agreement by failing to make changes to detect and prevent future violations of anti-fraud laws.
You might be tempted to think the multiple dead whistleblowers have something to do with it, but the plea deal the DOJ has offered the company really doesn't sound like it's as serious as all that.
In exchange of a guilty plea, Boeing will have to pay another round of fines and agree to a fraud monitor (of the company's choosing).
The families of the victims were outraged at the sweetheart deal.
'The underlying outrageous piece of this deal is that it doesn't acknowledge that Boeing's crime killed 346 people,' said Paul Cassell, one of the lawyers for victims' families. 'Boeing is not going to be held accountable for that, and they are not going to admit that that happened.'
Sanjiv Singh, a lawyer for 16 families who lost relatives in the October 2018 Lion Air crash off Indonesia, called the plea offer 'extremely disappointing.' The terms, he said, 'read to me like a sweetheart deal.'
The saddest part about it all is that deferred prosecution agreements were meant to let businesses continue to conduct commerce for fixing small offenses like Donald Trump's bookkeeping conviction in New York, not to cover up and avoid justice for the negligent deaths of hundreds of their customers.
It's almost like Justice is not only blind, but she's stupid too.
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