The Mercury (Pottstown, PA)

Amazon sues over doomed Pentagon bid

E-commerce giant says ‘improper pressure’ behind the scenes harmed its chances for $10 billion contract

- By Matt O’Brien and Joseph Pisani

Amazon says President Donald Trump’s “improper pressure” and behind-the-scenes attacks harmed its chances of winning a $10 billion Pentagon contract.

The Pentagon awarded the cloud computing contract to Microsoft in October.

Amazon argues in a lawsuit unsealed Monday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that the decision should be revisited because of “substantia­l and pervasive errors” and Trump’s interferen­ce.

Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos have been a frequent target of Trump, even before he became president. Bezos personally owns The Washington Post, which Trump has referred to as “fake news” whenever unfavorabl­e stories are published about him.

Amazon said it lost the deal due to Trump’s “personal vendetta against Mr. Bezos, Amazon, and the Washington Post.”

Pentagon spokeswoma­n Elissa Smith said in a statement Monday the decision to select Microsoft “was made by an expert team of career public servants and military officers” and without external influence.

Formally called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastruc­ture plan, or JEDI, the military’s computing project would store and process vast amounts of classified data. The Defense Department has said it will help speed up its war planning

and fighting capabiliti­es and enable the military to advance its use of artificial intelligen­ce.

Amazon and Microsoft became the finalists after Oracle and IBM were eliminated in an earlier round of the contract competitio­n. Oracle had also sued, arguing the bidding was rigged in Amazon’s favor. Trump publicly waded into the bidding process over the summer,

saying he heard complaints and wanted the Pentagon to take a closer look.

“The department is confident in the JEDI award and remains focused on getting this critical capability into the hands of our warfighter­s as quickly and efficientl­y as possible,” Smith said.

The White House didn’t immediatel­y return an emailed request for comment Monday. Microsoft

also didn’t immediatel­y return a request for comment but is intervenin­g in the court case to defend its contract win.

Amazon makes the case in the lawsuit that its cloud services were a better fit for the project because of its speed, efficiency and experience securely handling classified government data. It says the Defense Department made errors in the procuremen­t

process that make little sense without taking into account Trump’s antipathy toward Amazon.

“Basic justice requires reevaluati­on of proposals and a new award decision,” the lawsuit says. “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.”

Amazon Web Services has been the industry leader in moving businesses and other institutio­ns onto its cloud — a term used to describe banks of servers in remote data centers that can be accessed from almost anywhere. But Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform has been steadily catching up, as have other providers such as Google, in both corporate and government settings.

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