Amazon lawsuit pins blame on Trump for missing out on deal
WASHINGTON: Amazon claims the Pentagon failed to fairly judge its bid for a cloud contract worth up to $10 billion because US President Donald Trump viewed company founder Jeffrey Bezos as his “political enemy”.
Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud unit, claimed in a lawsuit that was made public on Monday that the defence department ignored Amazon’s superior technology and awarded the contract to Microsoft despite its “key failures” to comply with requirements for the so-called Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract.
The Pentagon made those errors because of improper interference by Trump, who Amazon said “launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer the JEDI Contract away from AWS to harm his perceived political enemy - Jeffrey P Bezos”, according to the lawsuit. The president has long criticised Bezos, especially for his ownership of The Washington Post.
Defence department spokeswoman Elissa Smith denied any external factors influenced the bidding process.
Amazon, which filed its lawsuit under seal last month in the US court of federal claims, is seeking to prohibit the defence department from proceeding without a new evaluation or award decision.
“Basic justice requires re-evaluation of proposals and a new award decision,” the company said in its lawsuit. “The stakes are high. 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.”
The Pentagon’s JEDI project is designed to consolidate the department’s cloud computing infrastructure and modernise its technology systems. Amazon was widely seen as the front-runner for the contract because it previously won a lucrative cloud deal from the Central Intelligence Agency and had earned the highest levels of federal security authorisations.