The Pentagon has announced the award of a 10 year, $10 billion contract for cloud computing services to Microsoft, after most observers expected the award to go to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which controls a 48% share of the market. Amazon (owned by mega billionaire Jeff Bezos, a nemesis of demagogue and con man Donald "Quid Pro Quo" Trump) is the parent company of The Washington Post, which has been dogged in uncovering the multitude of Trump scandals. AWS pioneered the cloud computing business long before its competitors, which also include Oracle and IBM.
"The announcement came after an intense lobbying effort and a lawsuit filed by some of America’s biggest tech companies, which accused the military of favoring Amazon in a process that has dragged on for more than a year. During that time, Trump and other administration officials made it clear they did not want the contract to go to Amazon. Federal acquisition laws forbid politicians, including the president, from influencing contract awards." (our emphasis)This past July in a news conference, Trump directed his staff to look into the award, which proposed a single buy, rather than a piecemeal approach.
“I’m getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon. … They’re saying it wasn’t competitively bid,” Trump said. “Some of the greatest companies in the world are complaining about it, having to do with Amazon and the Department of Defense, and I will be asking them to look at it very closely to see what’s going on.
The president said he had heard complaints from “companies like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM,” each of which were initial bidders along with Amazon. Soon after, he retweeted a link to a Fox News segment that referred to the JEDI contract as the “Bezos bailout.”In a new book by Guy Snodgrass, an aide to former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Snodgrass confirmed Trump's hostility to Amazon / Bezos, writing that Trump wanted to "screw" Amazon out of the contract.
Amazon will almost certainly appeal to the General Accountability Office, using Trump's own words to demonstrate illegal bias in the procurement. Just another episode of Trump using his office to corrupt a process and get even with political opponents.
