I don't want to spin anything, and I've been wrong about a lot, but it's kind of sad that you went into attack dog mode and then completely overlooked the important details. Please do better.

You keep focusing on how John worked for them 7 years ago and totally ignore the present. People today are worried about Boeing now, and when they want to learn more about how things went wrong, they will look to people who used to work for Boeing. Retired whistleblowers are excellent candidates for talk show TV, YouTube, podcasts. That type of negative exposure could easily turn the general public, lawmakers, government oversight employees, against the company.

Gigantic companies don't care about wrongful termination lawsuits. That's chump change. But potentially losing lucrative government contracts, or potentially seeing your executives locked up because now public pressure is strong enough that regulators are forced to investigate, that type of stuff scares the big bosses.

I'm not saying that shady actions happened in this situation. I haven't looked into it. The police did, and in theory they did a proper job, but we've seen the police botch investigations in the past, too. That brings up an interesting tangential issue, which is that when your investigators have a long history of incompetence, it's harder to rule out conspiracy theories.