In a complaint filed in the US Court of Federal Claims, Amazon said Trump launched "repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer" the Pentagon cloud contract called the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure, popularly known as JEDI, away from Amazon Web Services.
The complaint, which is heavily redacted, accused Trump of aiming to “harm his perceived political enemy — Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder and CEO of AWS’s parent company, Amazon.com ... and owner of the Washington Post.”
Amazon said Trump’s interference made it impossible for the Pentagon to judge a winner “reasonably, consistently, and in a fair and equal manner,” according to the lawsuit.
“The question is whether the President of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of the DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends,” the 103-page complaint said, while also calling for a reevaluation of the proposals submitted to the Pentagon and a new award decision.
Meanwhile, top Pentagon technology official, Dana Deasy, denied that Trump or the White House influenced the JEDI selection process in recent congressional testimony. The Pentagon said earlier that the agency was not influenced by outside factors in its decision-making.
The Department of Defence announced the JEDI project to build a cloud computing platform to support weapons systems and classified data storage in early 2018, saying that it would choose one company to handle the entire project. The $10-billion cloud computing contract was eventually awarded to Microsoft.
