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Accusations fly after Trump admin awards $10 billion contract to Microsoft, NOT ‘front-runner’ Amazon

October 26, 2019 | | Print Article
(File photo from White House/File photo video screenshot from Business Insider)

Thanks to left-wing rage, congressional Democrats may soon be maneuvering to launch yet another investigation against President Donald Trump.

Why? Because in a move that triggered apoplexy from the left, early Friday morning the Department of Defense announced that it has chosen Microsoft over Amazon as the recipient of a much-anticipated $10 billion cloud computing contract.

As a result, Microsoft will have the very high-paying honor of designing an “enterprise-wide cloud solution, Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), for the majority of systems and applications” used by the Defense Department.

The problem, or so claims the left, is that Amazon had been the front-runner in the winner-take-all competition up until President Donald Trump complained about the process over the summer. This clearly proves something, they allege.

“So I’m getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon. They’re saying it wasn’t competitively bid. … And I will be asking them to look at it very closely to see what’s going on,” the president said in mid-July.

Weeks later, The Washington Post confirmed that the contract had been put on delay.

“The White House has instructed newly installed Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper to reexamine the awarding of the military’s massive cloud-computing contract because of concerns that the deal would go to Amazon, officials close to the decision-making process said,” the outlet reported in early August.

“The 11th-hour Oval Office intervention comes just weeks before the winning bid was expected to be announced and has now left a major military priority up in the air, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door process freely.”

Two months later, all of a sudden the front-runner has been knocked to the back and the contract has been awarded to Microsoft? This can only mean one thing, notorious anti-Trump zealots like George Conway now claim: Trump screwed Amazon out of the contract because of his dislike for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. The president must, therefore, be investigated yet again.

Look:

But this narrative neglects a couple of notable facts, with one being that the process of choosing a winner has been under investigation since early August when the Defense Department’s inspector general began evaluating it over allegations of corruption.

What sort of corruption? Back in Spring, a slew of the other tech companies competing for the contract “claimed the winner-take-all nature of the award and criteria by which a vendor will be selected violate industry best practices and were geared to deliver the entirety of the contract to Amazon Web Services,” according to CRN magazine.

Now fast-forward back to July and recall what Trump said: “So I’m getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon. They’re saying it wasn’t competitively bid.”

Given the complaints reported about in spring, it appears the president’s remarks in July weren’t motivated by any personal animosity he feels toward Amazon but rather by legitimate concerns — concerns raised not by him but rather by the competition’s other participants.

All this suggests therefore that even if Democrats were to take Conway’s advice and launch an investigation into this matter, they’d wind up just as empty-handed as they invariably do.

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Vivek Saxena
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