Posted on 11/19/2019 7:23:22 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
The White House faces a very ugly legal battle with Amazon over the handling of a massive contract to handle the Pentagons vast cloud computing needs, experts say, and top administration officials ultimately may have to reveal under oath whether President Trump personally interfered in the process.
The fight is already shaping up as a battle of economic and political super heavyweights, with Mr. Trump making clear his lack of respect for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his business empire, which happens to include The Washington Post.
The Defense Department last month awarded the 10-year, $10 billion military cloud computing contract to Microsoft, surprising observers who believed Amazon was the clear front-runner. With Amazon Web Services now lodging a formal protest and alleging clear political bias that prevented the company from winning the lucrative deal, attention turns to a potentially explosive legal proceeding likely to ensnare the president, Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper and other top officials across the federal government.
The fight over the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program is gearing up during impeachment proceedings in the House and almost surely will produce another major legal headache for the White House. Analysts say a court battle between the administration and Amazon would center on whether Mr. Trump broke historical precedent and directed the Defense Department to select Microsoft.
The legal fight will likely result in sworn depositions of top administration officials, the release of internal memos and emails regarding JEDI, and other information that may shine a light on what influence, if any, the White House had over the process.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
I am so sick of wild ass charges against Trump.
He has become the crutch to idiots everywhere.
Time to start inspecting every Amazon package arriving air mail from China.
?????
The end of the headline is accurate.
I think Amazon know they are not getting this because their security sucked. They just trying to muddy the waters to conceal they lost. There were multiple articles voice deep concerns about Amazons security.
Trump gets to perform DISCOVERY about ALL of Amazon's secrets as well.
It appears that Amazon cheated in the procurement process. They had a couple of ex-Amazon cloud employees move to the DoD who helped draft the procurement requirements, which seemingly favored Amazon’s cloud. After the contract was sent out for bidding, at least one of them went back to work for Amazon cloud services.
I am a fan of Amazon, shop there all the time because it’s cheap and convenient. I can order a box of tea or coffee, it is cheaper than the market and they deliver it “free”. I don’t know how they can mail me a $10 item the next day and still make money. They have done a lot of good for the American consumer. But they appear to have done so at the expense of many other businesses. The capital markets have subsidized their retail losses for ages. Bezos is brilliant in so many ways - For years I did not understand why he invested so much into technology products like he would somehow compete with Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, IBM etc etc. Now I know. That is where they make their money. They probably lose money on every retail order they ship out but make profits off the cloud and their technology offerings that get them close to breakeven. THey are spending so much on cloud and fulfillment services as it is, that they might as well sub-lease some of their infrastructure to 3rd parties.
If I had figured it out sooner I would have put all my money into Amazon stock.
turns to a potentially explosive legal proceeding likely to ensnare the president,
Why? Because you clowns want it to? HOW could the author possibly know enough to be able to honestly write that line?
It probably didn’t help Amazon’s bid that WaPo received and reported on leaked classified data. That sort of thing is kind of frowned upon when you’re bidding on a contract to provide secure computing services to the government. As far as I know, Microsoft doesn’t own a newspaper.
The problem with any cloud services is lock-in. They are all bad, but Amazon is the worst. You have to pay 1000’s of dollars every two years for certificates that state you know all of Amazon’s proprietary trivia.
The DOD has the money, they should build and operate their own Cloud data center.
Yes there were and I think I've either read them all, or pretty darn close to them all. I'm in I.T. Leadership at the large multi-national bank I work for and we had AWS representatives in to talk to us about what they're doing to fix their security issues. I don't think any of us were impressed.
I have quite a few contacts in Financial Services in the big firms and I'll tell you flat-out that Amazon's security has many in financial services re-evaluating their workloads on AWS and either moving, or preparing to move them to Azure.
Amazon is right to be concerned about their losing a contract with DoD ... it's going to be one of many losses they're going to suffer and rightfully so.
BTW, cloud engineers and architects (like myself) are in very high demand and command very high salaries. It's a darn good field to be in right now.
Simple. The Executive Branch decides solely. The Constitution grants the Executive sole discretion in such matters.
The Executive is under no obligation to consider any company that can be proven beyond doubt to be openly hostile to the Executive Branch.
But, once again, some lib at a lower court will rule against the Executive and the SC will uphold president Trumps administration on this.
But, it will be dragged out long enough for the Dems and the MSM to make a lot of noise in the mean time.
“Trump gets to perform DISCOVERY about ALL of Amazon’s secrets as well.”
Yes. Amazon will have to refute the government’s assessment of its capabilities and security in order to show they lost only because Bezos is an ass. How will it do that without revealing what they are? This lawsuit looks like a lose-lose situation for Bezos.
Forget "modern" medicine... The only medical cure for this disease is "bloodletting"... Where's Spike when we really need him???
The conflict of interest is not with Trump. It’s with Bezos. He shouldn’t be getting a defense contract while he’s running WaPo.
“...whether Mr. Trump broke historical precedent and directed the Defense Department to select Microsoft.”
These fools refuse to accept presidential authority. I did not realize that Bezos thinks he is entitled to whatever he wishes, including taxpayer money.
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