Amazon wants to ‘depose’ Trump over losing $10 billion Pentagon contract

Still fuming over the loss of the Pentagon cloud computing deal to Microsoft, Amazon is arguing that President Donald Trump’s personal bias improperly influenced the decision, even invoking his impeachment to make their case.

Court documents unsealed on Monday reveal that Amazon is seeking to depose Trump personally, as well as the current Defense Secretary Mark Esper, his predecessor James Mattis, and four other officials involved with the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract.

In US law, depositions are out-of-court examinations of witnesses conducted by lawyers, whose transcripts can be used as sworn testimony during a trial. 

JEDI seemed tailor-made for Amazon’s AWS cloud division, especially after the Seattle behemoth swatted away a lawsuit by Oracle. Then Trump asked Esper to “look into it” in July 2019, and the contract ended up going to Microsoft Azure in October – leaving Amazon boss Jeff Bezos furious.

The richest man in the world also owns the Washington Post, which has been consistently opposed to Trump since before he took office. Now the company is citing Trump’s criticism of the newspaper, Amazon and Bezos over the years as proof of his bias, and alleging he is using the Pentagon budget “to pursue his own personal and political ends.”

“President Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to use his position as President and Commander in Chief to interfere with government functions — including federal procurements — to advance his personal agenda,” Amazon Web Services told CNBC in a statement.

As further evidence of this, the lawsuit even points to Trump’s impeachment — which was still ongoing in late January, when the paperwork was filed. In the meantime, the Senate acquitted Trump of all charges.

Amazon’s claim also seems to rest in part on a line in Mattis’s recent memoir, in which he claimed that Trump told him to “screw Amazon” out of the contract. Mattis had resigned in December 2018, in protest over Trump’s orders to pull US troops out of Syria.

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