A federal judge in Texas has set a June trial date for the U.S. government’s years-old conspiracy case against Boeing for misleading regulators about the 737 Max jetliner before two of the planes crashed, killing 346 people.

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U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor did not explain in the scheduling order he issued on Tuesday why he decided to set the case for trial. Lawyers for the aerospace company and the Justice Department have spent months trying to renegotiate a July 2024 plea agreement that called for Boeing to plead guilty to a single felony charge.

The judge rejected that deal in December, saying that diversity, inclusion and equity policies the Justice Department had in place at the time might influence the selection of a monitor to oversee the company’s compliance with the terms of its proposed sentence.

Since then, O’Connor had three times extended the deadline for the two sides to report how they planned to proceed. His most recent extension, granted earlier this month, gave them until April 11 to “confer on a potential resolution of this case short of trial.”

The judge revoked the remaining time with his Tuesday order, which laid out a timeline for proceedings leading up to a June 23 trial in Fort Worth.

The Department of Justice declined to comment on the judge’s action. A Boeing statement shed no light on the status of the negotiations.

“As stated in the parties’ recent filings, Boeing and the Department of Justice continue to be engaged in good faith discussions regarding an appropriate resolution of this matter,” the company said.

The deal the judge refused to approve would have averted a criminal trial by allowing Boeing to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud Federal Aviation Administration regulators who approved minimal pilot-training requirements for the 737 Max nearly a decade ago. More intensive training in flight simulators would have increased the cost for airlines to operate the then-new plane model.

The development and certification of what has become Boeing’s bestselling airliner became an intense focus of safety investigators after two of Max planes crashed less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019. Many relatives of passengers who died off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia have pushed for the prosecution of former Boeing officials, a public criminal trial and more severe financial punishment for the company.

In response to criticism of last year’s plea deal from victims’ families, prosecutors said they did not have evidence to argue that Boeing’s deception played a role in the crashes. Prosecutors told O’Connor the conspiracy to commit fraud charge was the toughest they could prove against Boeing.

O’Connor did not object in his December ruling against the plea agreement to the sentence Boeing would have faced: a fine of up to $487.2 million with credit given for $243.6 million in previously paid penalties; a requirement to invest $455 million in compliance and safety programs; and outside oversight during three years of probation.

Instead, the judge focused his negative assessment on the process for selecting an outsider to keep an eye on Boeing’s actions to prevent fraud. He expressed particular concern that the agreement “requires the parties to consider race when hiring the independent monitor … ‘in keeping with the (Justice) Department’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.’”

“In a case of this magnitude, it is in the utmost interest of justice that the public is confident this monitor selection is done based solely on competency. The parties’ DEI efforts only serve to undermine this confidence in the government and Boeing’s ethics and anti-fraud efforts,” O’Connor wrote.

An executive order President Donald Trump signed during the first week of his second term ended diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government, likely rendering the judge’s concerns moot.

Trump’s return to office also means the Justice Department’s leadership has changed since federal prosecutors decided last year to pursue the case against Boeing.

Boeing agreed to the plea deal only after the Justice Department determined last year that the company violated a 2021 agreement that had protected it against criminal prosecution on the same fraud-conspiracy charge.

Government officials started reexamining the case after a door plug panel blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max during flight in January 2024. That incident renewed concerns about manufacturing quality and safety at Boeing, and put the company under intense scrutiny by regulators and lawmakers.

Boeing lawyers said last year that if the plea deal were rejected, the company would challenge the Justice Department’s finding that it breached the deferred-prosecution agreement. O’Connor helped Boeing’s position by writing in his December decision that it was not clear what the company did to violate the 2021 deal.

Doing what the party wants

Tim Walz has been Minnesota governor since 2019. He has been elected twice with just over 50% of the vote. In the time as governor he certainly has been in the news often.

The George Floyd riots in the spring of 2020 gave the governor a chance to show strong leadership for Minnesota; many think it was his absence from leadership that extended the riots that brought him into the news cycle.

Covid – what a tough time to make decisions but the governor was present in most news coverage.

Take the 2023 legislative session where the Democrats held the governorship and both houses of the Legislature — the trifecta as it was called. In that session Minnesota had an $18 billion surplus and the governor and his Legislature spent it all and raised the biennial budget from $52 billion to $72 billion (a 38% increase). The governor said on the news that he was very proud of this session and its productivity.

Fraud in state government the past five years during the Walz administration has been in the news often with the Feeding our Future scandal leading the way, along with others, totaling almost a half billion dollars. The governor has come out in the press to say this has to be addressed. Kind of like close the barn door after the horse is out.

In 2024 the Governor pursued nomination to run as VP; he got it and was in the national news constantly and absent from Minnesota for four months.

In 2025 the Minnesota legislative session was called to order and for the first three-plus weeks only the Republicans showed in the House of Representatives; thought the governor might show up to try to resolve the dispute that kept his party away from the Capitol, but I thought wrong.

Seems the governor is now taking his direction from new national Democratic Party Chair Ken Martin, leaving the state and touring other states and visiting congressional districts where the seat is held by a Republican and promoting his party’s agenda.

I guess this is just the way politics is, once you are elected you do what the party wants and not pay much attention to the needs of people (all people) in your state or district.

I hope we elect a person governor who shows they are a leader focusing on Minnesota issues and not what their political party leaders dictate.

Tom Troskey, St. Paul

 

I guess I am safe?

I read with horror that Pete Hegseth, Elon Musk, Donald Trump or their proxies are removing Pentagon references to D.E.I. because they don’t believe in their importance. I was somehow drawn back to memories of the Taliban blowing up World Heritage Sites because some of those sites represented beliefs disparate from their own. But then I considered that, well, Hegseth and the others were not actually blowing things up but only “removing” images.

And of course they also are not prosecuting or “removing” me from my family, they are only threatening other persons with prosecution who have challenged their beliefs. So I guess I am safe?

Kenneth Gilmore, Oakdale

 

‘Declaration of Conscience’

We need another Margaret Chase Smith. In the late 1940s to the mid 1950s there was a period referred to as the “Red Scare” and McCarthyism. During this time, Republican Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy rose to power. He presented himself as the only salvation against Communist infiltration and used the tactic of fear to maintain power. His M.O. was a rapid fire of accusations that a person was a Communist without evidence while shielding himself against reprisals due to Senate immunity.

The first person to take a stand against Sen. McCarthy was Maine Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith. On June 1, 1950, Sen. Smith took to the well of the Senate floor and gave a speech, “Declaration of Conscience.” Sen. McCarthy’s name was never used and was implied. Sen. Smith expressed her concern about a psychologically divided country, witch hunts that allowed multiple innocent people to be smeared, that we allowed ourselves to be tools of totalitarianism techniques of confuse, divide and conquer and the prevalence of fear, ignorance, bigotry, and sensationalism as innocent people were attacked and recipients of trial by accusation with no recourse.

Sen. Chase made a plea to recapture our unity and to promote the stalwarts of democracy: the right to protest, to hold unpopular beliefs, to criticize and right of independent thought. This speech was signed and concurred wotj by six other Republicans. Sen. Smith for four more years continued to speak up against McCarthy at great political risk. Finally in1954 the Senate censured Sen. McCarthy for improper conduct and he lost power and faded away.

Who will be our next Margaret Chase Smith?

Geri Minton, Roseville

 

For the long haul

Thanks to the Prairie Island Indian Community for being a stalwart friend of Grey Cloud Island. They are guided by such noble values and are fully committed to the preservation of cultural treasures and natural spaces. Their wisdom and spirit of generosity inspire us.

The Prairie Island Indian Community has never hesitated to help Grey Cloud Island, the smallest township in Minnesota, in our battle against Holcim, a multi-billion-dollar international company always seeking ways to extract more rock (a.k.a. blow the island to smithereens). Again and again, Holcim has tried to change our mining setbacks and blast closer to homes, despite the grave concern of residents.

Through it all, Prairie Island has been a voice of reason, contributing an historical perspective that far surpasses Holcim, who will one day complete their extractions, pack up and never return, leaving behind irreversible damage: a giant hole in our island.

Our friendship with Prairie Island has been a lifeline. Specifically, we owe a debt of gratitude to Shelley Buck and Barry Hand for their kindness and camaraderie. We also applaud Tribal Council President Grant Johnson for his leadership.

Grey Cloud Island is a sacred site for the Prairie Island Indian Community. It is home to the largest concentration of burial mounds in Washington County. Prairie Island has been an invaluable resource as we strive to preserve these artifacts. They are our teachers and our friends.

Ted Ries, Grey Cloud Island resident

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By MICHAEL R. SISAK

NEW YORK (AP) — A top Justice Department official was leaning toward dropping corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams even before summoning the top Manhattan federal prosecutor at the time to Washington to discuss the case, newly unsealed documents show.

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Former interim U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon said in a draft memo made public Tuesday that Emil Bove — now the department’s third-in-command — told her of his thinking on Jan. 27, four days before a closed-door meeting at Justice Department headquarters where she and Adams’ lawyers argued for and against keeping the case alive.

Sassoon said she suggested Bove wait on a decision until President Donald Trump’s nominee for Deputy U.S Attorney General, Todd Blanche, was confirmed by the Senate. She said Bove told her that Blanche — his former law partner and co-counsel on Trump’s criminal defense team — was on the “same page” and there was “no need to wait.”

In her draft memo, Sassoon offers details, observations and a heavy dose of frustration that did not make it into the final version sent to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Feb. 12, the day before Sassoon resigned in protest.

The draft memo and other documents — including text messages, emails and comments reflecting internal discussions among prosecutors — were made public as the mayor’s case teeters toward a likely dismissal.

The Justice Department had filed the documents under seal on March 7, the same day a court-appointed legal expert advised the judge, Dale E. Ho, that legally he has no choice but to end the case.

Bove and Blanche, confirmed two days earlier, suggested in an accompanying public court filing that the documents raised questions about the strength of the case against the mayor and whether the mayor was a target of the so-called weaponization of justice.

In seeking dismissal, Bove has argued that the charges were filed too close to Adams’ reelection campaign and that defending himself in court would distract him from assisting in Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Ho, who has yet to rule on the request, ordered that the records be made public by Tuesday after several media outlets sought their disclosure.

Adams was indicted in September on charges alleging he accepted over $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions and travel perks from a Turkish official and others seeking to buy influence while he was Brooklyn borough president. He faces multiple challengers in June’s Democratic primary. He has pleaded not guilty and insisted he is innocent.

Adams and his lawyers have suggested that he was charged as punishment for criticizing then-President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. Prosecutors involved in the case have denied that, writing in a court filing earlier this year that the investigation into Adams began a year before he started speaking out.

At the Jan. 31 meeting in Washington, Sassoon wrote that Bove gave her and her team just 40 minutes to detail the chronology of the investigation, ordered one of them to shred his notes, and he did not give her a chance to address “a number of issues that bear on the decision to seek dismissal of the case.”

Sassoon said Adams’ lawyers were then given 40 minutes to discuss “the impact of the case on his ability to govern” and assist in immigration enforcement.

“That simply does not suffice,” Sassoon wrote.

She called the nature of the discussions about the Adams’ case “alarming” and added that she remains “baffled by the urgent and superficial process by which this decision was reached.”

Adams’ advocacy, Sassoon said, “should be called out for what it is: an improper effort to withhold immigration assistance for a dismissal of his case.”

Among the issues Sassoon said she wanted to address at the Jan. 31 meeting was Bove’s contention that recent actions by former U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who brought the Adams case, tarnished the case with the appearance of impropriety.

Sassoon noted in the draft memo that while she was “personally disappointed” by Williams “self-serving actions” after he stepped down late last year — which included his penning a column on public corruption and launching a campaign-style website — they didn’t warrant dismissing the case.

“There are myriad ways to address any arising prejudice or weaponization well short of a dismissal — steps routinely taken in other cases with pretrial publicity — but I never had a chance to raise them,” Sassoon wrote.

Other documents unsealed Tuesday offered a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how federal prosecutors in Manhattan built and then tried to salvage the Adams case.

They include discussions over text messages about case strategy and suggested edits to a draft of a court filing in January after Adams’ lawyers alleged that Williams’ column and website had tainted the case with “ethical misconduct.”

In comment bubbles down the right margin of a Microsoft Word document, prosecutor Hagan Scotten cautioned colleagues on the political implications and public perceptions of certain phrasing, parsing which words and facts to include or delete.

Scotten, who also resigned last month in protest, suggesting nixing a line about Adams’ indictment having been approved at the highest levels, writing: “There’s no world in which saying the Biden Justice Dept approved this helps us.”

He also suggested deleting a line that, in his assessment, appeared to pass the buck to the grand jury for indicting Adams.

“We want the judge and everyone else to believe us when we say DW didn’t cause this prosecution,” Scotten wrote, referring to Williams. “Hiding behind the grand jury will sound disingenuous to knowledgeable readers, since GJs will come pretty close to indicting ham sandwiches.”

Gophers athletics director Mark Coyle left the scorers table at the NCAA tournament game between Iowa State and Mississippi in Milwaukee on Sunday night. His prospective new men’s basketball coach, Niko Medved and Colorado State were going down the wire against Maryland in Seattle.

From a quiet room inside Fiserv Forum, the Rams took a lead in the final seconds, and Coyle’s daughter Grace asked, “What are we going to do” if Colorado State won and advanced to the Sweet 16?

“I was cheering for Colorado State because I wanted them to win,” Coyle said Tuesday. “But I said, ‘We are waiting.’ Grace Coyle had a good scoop. We were going to wait until they finished their tournament.”

Maryland hit the first buzzer-beater of March Madness seconds later and Grace’s question was moot. Medved was available to sign with Minnesota, and he was introduced at a news conference Tuesday on the U’s practice facility court.

Coyle moved quickly toward a new coach after firing Ben Johnson on March 13. He talked with Medved when the Rams were going into the Mountain West region and through the first round NCAA Tournament win over Memphis.

“I can tell you in my early conversations with Niko, I felt we were in a really, really good spot,” Coyle said.

Medved and the school have agreed to a six-year deal that still requires approval from the Board of Regents.

Coyle prides himself on personally making coaching hires with some help from other U staffers. He keeps lists of candidates and doesn’t use search firms.

“We started to work on lists in February, early March,” Coyle said.

On the day Johnson was fired, Coyle immediately heard from other coaches’ agents. But were there other serious candidates?

“In terms of how many people we talked to, it was a very focused group,” Coyle said.

Thoughts on The Barn

From afar, Medved has heard “knocks” on the nearly 100-year-old Williams Arena, but he doesn’t buy that The Barn makes it tough to win at the U.

“I think we can turn that into a strength of the program,” he said. “Everybody is talking about, ’This is the problem.’ I think it can be a strength. I think it’s one of the most historic venues in all of college basketball. Have you been to Phog Allen (Fieldhouse in Kansas)? Have you been to Cameron Indoor Stadium?

“Now, sure, down the road, are there enhancements you might have to make and to try to modernize it? Yeah.”

Scheduling St. Thomas

Johnson did not want to play St. Thomas, and the U never played the Tommies after it jumped from NCAA Division III into Division I in 2021.

Medved, however, said he is “open” to that.

“I’m a competitive guy; it would be fun,” he said. “If you play St. Thomas, you’d better buckle up because they are really good. I can see that happening at some point.”

NIL on repeat

Medved faced multiple questions about name, image and likeness (NIL) funding and revenue sharing coming on line for players starting next season. One reporter said he would spare him another question on the topic.

“Listen, that is all we talk about,” Medved said. “It’s death, taxes, coaches talking about NIL.”

Earlier in the Q&A, Medved said he believes more money is needed in that space and that the U and boosters can provide what is necessary. But he also said he can find ways to win when he won’t have as much as his new Big Ten competitors.

Unnamed rivals

Medved grew up a Gophers fan in Roseville, so he knows the importance of the rivalries with Iowa and Wisconsin. But he didn’t name them Tuesday.

“I look forward to seeing The Barn packed,” he said. “A big game, maybe against a rival, OK, down south, down east and finding a way to pull it out, having our fans celebrate, seeing ourselves back in the NCAA Tournament.”

Staff coming together

Dave Thorson, who was on Ben Johnson’s staff after he worked with Medved at Colorado State and Drake, is expected to remain on the U staff. He gave a thumbs up to Medved when informally asked during the news conference.

One of Medved’s assistants with the Rams, Brian Cooley, and his director of player development, Joe De Ciman, are two other candidates to join Minnesota.

Colorado State’s associate head coach Ali Farokhmanesh is now the Rams’ interim head coach and expected to be named the permanent head coach.

Briefly

Former Gophers forward Frank Mitchell committed to St. Bonaventure on Tuesday; the Canadian entered the portal after Johnson’s firing. … Many Gophers players from last year’s team watched Medved’s news conference, and the most important player to retain is Isaac Asuma, the Cherry, Minn., guard coming off a promising freshman season. … Senior forward Parker Fox played the majority of last season through a meniscus injury in his knee. He will now have surgery on it. He dealt with that on top of a back issue and still played in all 32 games. … P.J. Fleck and the entire football coaching staff was in attendance. Fleck and Medved chatted after the news conference. … Volleyball coach Keegan Cook and women’s basketball coach Dawn Plitzuweit also were spotted.

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