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WASHINGTON – Amazon.com urged a US judge to throw away the award of the Pentagon’s $ 10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract after the Department of Defense said in September that a court re-evaluation found the proposal of Microsoft Corp still represented the best value to the government.
The company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit said in a redacted Oct. 23 lawsuit Tuesday that the award to Microsoft should be invalidated because it is the product of President Trump’s systematic bias, bad faith, and undue influence over President Trump’s price away from “the company. It called it a” flawed and politically corrupt decision. “
| Ticker | Safety | Last | Change | Change% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMZN | AMAZON.COM INC. | 3,165.12 | +8.15 | + 0.26% |
The White House declined to comment, referring questions to the Justice Department. The Pentagon did not immediately comment.
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Microsoft said in a statement Tuesday, “Careers procurement officers at the DoD decided that given the superior technical benefits and overall value, we continued to provide the best solution.”
It added, “It’s time we went ahead and get this technology in the hands of those who need it urgently: the women and men who are protecting our nation.”
AWS said in a statement Tuesday that as a result of the Pentagon review in September, “the price differential fluctuated significantly, with AWS now the lowest-priced offer at tens of millions of dollars.”
A judge in February granted Amazon’s request to temporarily halt the deal; that stays in place.
The court is considering motions to dismiss Amazon’s amended complaint filed by the government and Microsoft. The motions have not been made public and it is not clear when the judge can decide.
Amazon, which was seen as a frontrunner to win the contract, filed a lawsuit in November 2019 after the contract was awarded to Microsoft. Trump has publicly mocked Amazon head Jeff Bezos and repeatedly criticized the company.
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According to Amazon’s new filing, Trump and his administration have “intensified a campaign of meddling and retaliation against those in DoD who are seen as being unfaithful to the president or able to draw conclusions that run counter to his personal interests.”
The company argued that the Pentagon’s latest review was “rife with errors even more outrageous than those plaguing the first award,” and that the Pentagon “manipulated its evaluations to contradict any semblance of rationality.”
The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud (JEDI) contract can cost up to $ 10 billion and is part of a broader digital modernization of the Pentagon.
Then Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the Pentagon made its choice fair. Trump fired Esper last month.
(Reporting by David Shepardson, edited by Rosalba O’Brien, Sonya Hepinstall and Raju Gopalakrishnan)