Pentagon pushes back on Amazon lawsuit

The Pentagon is rejecting a key part of Amazon’s lawsuit over whether President Trump improperly intervened in a $10 billion cloud-computing contract.

A Department of Defense (DOD) spokeswoman said Amazon was “not correct” when it alleged that the Pentagon had already chosen Microsoft as the contract winner by the time Defense Secretary Mark Esper publicly recused himself from the process in October.

“The assertion is not correct,” Elissa Smith told The Hill on Wednesday. She said Esper recused himself on October 7.

Ten days later, on October 17, the department chose Microsoft over Amazon as the winner of the lucrative contract to create a cloud-computing infrastructure for the entire department.

The Amazon lawsuit before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims raises new questions about Esper’s decision to recuse himself. It notes that Esper’s recusal did not become public until Oct. 22, when the secretary said he was formally stepping away from the JEDI process because his son worked for IBM, which had bid on the JEDI contract but was no longer in the running. At the time, the Pentagon did not indicate that Esper had already recused himself two weeks beforehand.

The dispute comes amid a high-stakes legal battle over whether Trump improperly pressured the Pentagon to choose Microsoft as the winner of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract because he wanted to spurn his rival, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Amazon was widely considered to be the front-runner before Trump began interfering in the process over the summer.