Amazon is putting the loss of the $10 billion Pentagon JEDI cloud contract squarely on the shoulders of President Trump, according to a filing.
In a heavily redacted, 103-page filing in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, Amazon said that President Trump put "improper pressure" on the U.S. Department of Defense to award the contract to Microsoft. Despite being the heavy favorite to win the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, the Department of Defense awarded it to Microsoft on Oct. 25.
RELATED: Amazon protests Pentagon picking Microsoft for its $10B JEDI cloud contract
Last month, Amazon filed a notice in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that said it planned to contest the Pentagon's decision to give Microsoft the cloud-computing contract. When the decision was announced, Amazon said in a statement that it was "the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly led to a different conclusion."
In the filing that was released Monday, Amazon said it didn't win the 10-year contract because of President Trump's open dislike of Jeffery Bezos, who is the CEO of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post.
In a new book, the speech writer for former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis wrote that Trump called Mattis in the summer of 2018, and directed him to "screw Amazon" out of a chance to bid on the contract, according to the website Task and Purpose. Mattis declined to do that, according to the book.
Aside from being the cloud market leader, AWS was also considered the front-runner because it had built cloud services for the Central Intelligence Agency prior to Trump's reported interest in the contract.
RELATED: Trump mulls stepping into Pentagon's JEDI cloud contract that AWS, Microsoft are pursuing
President Trump openly interjected himself into contract process in July when he said to reporters that he "never had something where more people are complaining,” according to a story by CNBC.
“The question is whether the President of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends,” the Amazon's filing states, according to a story by CNBC. “DoD’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.’ Basic justice requires re-evaluation of proposals and a new award decision.”
The complaint said Pentagon officials made multiple “egregious errors” in its evaluation of bids from Amazon and Microsoft, including glossing over Amazon Web Service's market leading position in the cloud sector.
“This source selection decision was made by an expert team of career public servants and military officers from across the Department of Defense and in accordance with DoD's normal source-selection process,” according to a statement by the Pentagon. “There were no external influences on the source selection decision.”