In December, Amazon said President Trump engineered “behind-the-scenes attacks” against the company, which led to the e-commerce and cloud computing company missing out on a major contract for cloud services.
Now the company’s top spokesperson, Jay Carney, said Wednesday that Amazon wants President Donald Trump to disclose his involvement in a $10 billion cloud contract to make sure the process was “free of political interference.”
“All we’re trying to do through this protest and this request for a legal review is to ensure that a proper decision was made on behalf of U.S. taxpayers,” Carney, a former press secretary for President Barack Obama, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday when asked about Amazon’s move to depose Trump.
“It’s about ensuring that the government, the Department of Defense, is free of political interference in these kinds of political decisions that affect the capabilities of our armed services,” he said.
In a heavily redacted, 103-page document made public last year, Amazon Web Services described why it’s protesting the Department of Defense’s decision to award Microsoft the JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract. AWS claims it didn’t earn the JEDI contract, which could be worth as much as $10 billion, on account of President Donald Trump’s continuous public and private attacks against Amazon and, more directly, toward its CEO Jeff Bezos.
Carney expressed that Amazon’s protest of the JEDI decision is “highly unusual,” pointing to the allegations demonstrated in the company’s lawsuit. By deposing Trump, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is looking to discover additional information concerning Trump’s involvement in the bidding process, such as as any discreet conversations that occurred or any instructions that were given regarding the award.
“It’s very important to us that a full legal review take place to examine what we believe was blatant political interference that took place in this process that affected the decision that was made,” Carney said.
Despite the news, Amazon’s stock has been practically parabolic over the last 2 week, up nearly 14% for the year already.
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