Amazon was widely expected to win the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract, but lost out when it was announced that Microsoft’s Azure will provide the backbone of the government’s new cloud. The company claims that the loss wasn’t fair, and it was President Trump’s disdain for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that lost it the contract.
In a legal filing on Monday, Amazon claimed that Trump has launched ‘repeated public and behind the scenes attacks’ against the cloud computing giant, in an attempt at steering the deal away from AWS. The company argued that Trump wanted to harm Bezos directly, and it’s not hard to see why – the President has been a vocal critic of Bezos and his ownership of the Washington Post.
Unfortunately for Trump, this is just the latest saga where he has been accused of interfering, and Amazon says that this interference made it impossible for the Pentagon to make a fair assessment. While it’s unlikely that Amazon’s legal action will change the result, it has asked for the courts to force the Department of Defense to come to a new award decision, hoping that it will go a different way.
For the DoD’s part, it claims that Trump had no influence on the JEDI contract, with the Pentagon’s technology official Dana Deasy saying as much during a congressional testimony. Amazon disagrees with that assessment, saying, “The question is whether the President of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends.”
