The tech giant Amazon has alleged that President Trump abused his power to stop the company from securing a contract with the Pentagon, CNN reports.
In a case currently before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Amazon claims that the president “launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks” intended to disrupt its pursuit of a cloud computing contract with the Department of Defense. The contract was ultimately given to Microsoft, and the deal is estimated to generate approximately $10 billion for the company over the next decade.
Amazon further claimed that President Trump did so out of his own personal dislike of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the anti-Trump newspaper The Washington Post. The complaint alleges that the president “[used] the budget of DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends.”
However, it has been revealed that the most prominent efforts to sabotage Amazon’s pursuit of the contract came from its own competitors. One of them was the company Oracle, which eventually produced a document “that alleged a vast conspiracy to help Amazon” win the contract. That document was eventually brought to President Trump’s attention.
A Pentagon spokeswoman insisted that there was no political motivation for the decision to award Microsoft the contract, saying that the “decision was made by an expert team of career public servants and military officers from across the Department of Defense…There were no external influences on the source selection decision.”