Amazon accuses Trump of pressuring the Pentagon to award giant contract to Microsoft

(Image credit: THOMAS SAMSON/Getty Images)

last updated 9 December 2019

Amazon apparently thinks the Pentagon should be able to relate to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when it comes to being pressured by President Trump.

The technology giant is still steaming over the Pentagon's decision to award the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, a massive military cloud computing contract, to its rival Microsoft, and the company is laying the blame at Trump's feet.

In a redacted legal complaint related to its lawsuit against the Pentagon released Wednesday, Amazon said the Defense Department's decision stemmed from "improper pressure" from Trump, who isn't the biggest fan of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The department'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,'" the complaint said. "The stakes are high. 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."

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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.

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