- Amazon is challenging the Pentagon's decision to award a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft, claiming the bidding process was "incurably tainted" by political interference by President Donald Trump.
- The Pentagon, and Microsoft, want the challenge dismissed because of a rule that says bidders in such deals should in some cases challenge the bidding process before it ends.
- Amazon argues the rule doesn't apply because it couldn't have known that political bias would play a role until after the deal was already awarded to Microsoft.
- Amazon also said the Pentagon refused to meet in person or answer Amazon's questions, which the company alleges is a sign of bias.
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Amazon hit back at the Pentagon in its dispute over a $10 billion cloud computing contract, saying the decision to award the contract to Microsoft was "incurably tainted" - evidenced, it says, by the Defense Department allegedly refusing to answer its questions.
The tech giant blasted the Pentagon and Microsoft's argument that Amazon should have complained sooner about the process for awarding the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project, which it claims was tainted by improper interference from President Donald Trump, a frequent critic of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, which Bezos also owns.
In a February court filing made public Thursday, the tech giant said the Pentagon did not bother to respond directly to Amazon's questions on the process - and refused to meet with Amazon in-person to discuss the decision. Amazon said it only received a written debrief from the Pentagon on the day Microsoft's win was announced.
"DoD's post-award refusals to respond to AWS's post-briefing questions, made it clear that the evaluations and resulting award decision were incurably tainted," the company said.
Amazon has argued that Trump's public feud with, and disdain for, Jeff Bezos played a key role in the decision. The company cited Trump's public tweets blasting Bezos, Amazon and the Washington Post, which Bezos owns.
Amazon's battle against the JEDI decision
The Pentagon awarded the $10 billion JEDI contract to Microsoft, in a stunning defeat for Amazon, whose Amazon Web Services - the dominant player in the cloud - was widely expected to win the project for building a massive platform that would store sensitive military and defense data.
Amazon has challenged the decision in court, and a federal claims judge ordered work on the contract to stop while the case plays out. The judge also recently gave an indication that Amazon's challenge could be successful, writing in a that AWS can likely prove the Pentagon made an error in the evaluation process and that the error affected the outcome. Microsoft disagrees.
The Department of Defense and Microsoft want the court to dismiss Amazon's challenge based on a rule that says bidders should challenge problems in the bidding process before it ends. Amazon argues the rule doesn't apply because it could not have known about the alleged bias in the process until Microsoft won the contract.
Microsoft and the Pentagon dismissed the claim, arguing that Amazon should have aired its concerns before the contract was awarded. Amazon counters that the reasoning is flawed, stressing that it respected the bid process, but that it only became aware of Trump's role in the decision after the Pentagon made its decision.
In the filing, Amazon argued that the Pentagon and Microsoft "suggest that AWS was immediately required to file a protest after every presidential tweet some of which, as the government and Microsoft emphasize occurred before the president was even elected."
"Had AWS filed serial protests each time President Trump expressed his anti-Amazon bias, the Court would have dismissed those protests as unripe at the government's urging and told AWS to refile once DoD had awarded the contract," Amazon said.
Amazon also cited the "unusual timing and circumstances" surrounding Defense Secretary Mike Esper's decision to recuse himself from the JEDI bidding process, which the Pentagon attributed to Esper's son's employment at IBM. The company said the decision was "mystifying" since Esper's son had been with IBM for nearly eight months and the Pentagon had already eliminated IBM from the process six months earlier.
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