Amazon Web Services has protested the decision of the US Department of Defence (DoD) to award a $10 billion contract for cloud computing to Microsoft, after the President reportedly ordered his then Defence Secretary James Mattis to ‘screw’ Amazon out of the contract.
The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract was initially expected to go to Amazon, only to be put on hold by a senior judge of the US Court of Federal Claims after Oracle filed a protest. It was then paused by the Pentagon just weeks before the final decision.
According to court documents filed by Amazon against the decision, multiple errors in the process were a result of Trump having "launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks” against Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos.
An excerpt from the filing is as follows: “DoD's substantial and pervasive errors are hard to understand and impossible to assess separate and apart from the President's repeatedly expressed determination to, in the words of the President himself, ‘screw Amazon.’”
Amazon says the Pentagon “failed to acknowledge the numerous instances in which [AWS’s] demonstrated capabilities vastly exceeded performance requirements,” adding that competitor Microsoft had failed to demonstrate that its solution was meeting technical requirements.
"President Trump has made no secret of his personal dislike for Mr. Bezos, Amazon, and the Washington Post, or of his express desire to harm them. The seeds of this animus originate with the Washington Post's coverage of him before he even was elected President. That coverage placed Mr. Bezos, Amazon, and the Washington Post directly in the crosshairs of President Trump's wrath," the filing said.
According to a Congressional research report, Project JEDI is a ten-year contract for the accelerated development of an enterprise-wide cloud services solution as part of the DoD’s modernisation efforts, which should be able to support unclassified, secret and top secret requirements for its data.
Oracle had opposed Amazon Web Services from getting the contract on the charge that former DoD employees who now work with AWS would trigger a conflict of interest. A DoD invesigation found no evidence of that, but found “individual violations of ethical standards established by the Federal Acquisition Regulation”.
Regarding Trump’s attempt to ‘screw’ Amazon out of the contract, the filing cited a biography by Guy Snodgrass—James Mattis’s former speechwriter—which claimed that Trump asked Mattis to do so in a phone held in 2018. The books later says that Mattis told Snodgrass about Trump order and said, “We're not going to do that. This will be done by the book, both legally and ethically.”
Mattis resigned in December 2018 over “irreconcilable policy differences” with Trump.
AWS has called for the DoD to terminate the project being awarded to Microsoft and conduct another review of the submitted proposals.
