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By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Justice Department and Boeing told a court on Friday they have not reached agreement on a revised plea deal after a U.S. judge in December rejected the deal, faulting a diversity and inclusion provision.
Boeing and the government "continue to work in good faith toward" a new agreement, they said in a joint filing. They asked U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor to give them until Feb. 16 to provide a new update. That timetable would give the administration of President-elect Donald Trump a chance to review the issue before moving forward.
In July, Boeing agreed to plead guilty to a criminal fraud conspiracy charge in the wake of 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 over three years of court-supervised probation as part of the deal.
Judge O'Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, in December rejected the deal, seizing on a sentence in the plea agreement mentioning the DOJ's diversity policy regarding the selection of an independent monitor to audit the planemaker's compliance practices.
Relatives of the victims of the two 737 MAX crashes, which occurred in 2018 and 2019 and killed 346 people, have called the plea agreement a "sweetheart" deal that failed to adequately hold Boeing accountable for the deaths of their loved ones.
An accepted plea deal would brand Boeing a convicted felon for conspiring to defraud the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration about problematic software affecting the flight control systems in the planes that crashed.
In May, the DOJ found Boeing had violated the terms of a 2021 agreement that had shielded it from prosecution over the crashes. Prosecutors then decided to criminally charge Boeing and negotiate the current plea deal.
The decision followed a Jan. 5, 2024, in-flight blowout of a door panel on an Alaska Airlines jet that exposed ongoing safety and quality issues at Boeing.
(Reporting by David Shepardson in WashingtonEditing by Matthew Lewis)
