Boeing (BA) wants President Trump to let it out of a guilty criminal plea agreement the jet maker reached with the Biden administration, according to a report.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Boeing is pushing Trump’s new Justice Department officials to allow it to withdraw that 2024 plea, in which it admitted that its workers conspired to defraud aviation regulators.
Boeing did not comment on the Wall Street Journal report.
Avoiding a criminal conviction would be a major victory for the company that could allow it to avoid compounded headwinds as it tries to show progress on several fronts more than one year after a door plug blew off a Boeing-made Alaska Airlines (ALK) 737 Max 9 jet.
Criminal convictions can foreclose or suspend a company’s right to contract with the federal government and frustrate its ability to secure loans, according to Eddie Jauregui, a white-collar defense attorney with Holland & Knight and former federal prosecutor.
Read more about Boeing’s stock moves and today’s market action.
Those consequences have particular meaning for Boeing, which counts the federal government as its largest customer and also happens to be the country’s largest exporter. Just last week, Boeing won a major contract to build a new F-47 jet fighter for the Pentagon.
Admitting guilt was meant to insulate Boeing from facing a criminal trial on the government’s allegation that the jet maker misled Federal Aviation Administration officials before two fatal 737 Max 8 crashes killed 346 people in the past decade.
Those allegations initially produced a deferred prosecution agreement reached in 2021, but last year the DOJ notified Boeing that it had breached the agreement after a door plug blew off a Boeing-made 737 Max 9 flown by Alaska Airlines.
After Boeing and Biden’s DOJ officials reached the guilty plea deal last year, they submitted it to a federal judge.
But that US judge for the Northern District of Texas, Reed O’Connor, decided late last year in an order that the deal was insufficient, in part because of its terms governing the selection and conditions for a corporate monitor tasked with protecting against future fraud.
O’Connor cited provisions in the agreement that included race as a condition in selecting a corporate monitor as “inappropriate” and “against the public interest.”
The judge said the crash victims’ families opposed race as a consideration in the selection of the corporate monitor, as well as a section that omitted Boeing’s compliance with the monitor’s anti-fraud recommendations as a condition of its probation.
