The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
First to have a crack at it was Robert Mueller. Next up was Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats, who took a mighty swing but also whiffed. Could the one to finally strike a blow be … Amazon?
The filings last week in an obscure federal contracting court by our Seattle tech bad boys made some headlines, mostly because Jeff Bezos and company are brazenly seeking to depose the baddest boy of all, Donald Trump.
But “Amazon Web Services v. United States of America” seems to me to have the potential to develop into a full-blown political scandal. The motions made Monday show that our little Seattle online bookstore has decided to throw standard business and lobbying caution to the wind by joining an all-out, and overtly political, war with the U.S. president.
At issue is a $10 billion Defense Department contract to transition the military into cloud computing. These are typically boring but important public bid fights, in which both companies and the government must follow arcane procurement rules on complex proposals that can run to tens of thousands of pages.
Long story shorter: Amazon thought it had won the big contract, but lost it to Microsoft after a seemingly abrupt turnaround. That’s where all hell breaks loose.
“This is not an ordinary bid protest,” the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington declared in a follow-up court filing. “Plaintiff Amazon … alleges not only that the U.S. Department of Defense inaccurately evaluated the technical aspects of its proposal for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract — but also that DoD did so because President Donald J. Trump engaged in a ‘blatant and sustained effort to direct the outcome’ in order to ‘pursue his own personal and political ends.’ ”
Sound familiar? It’s exactly what Trump was just impeached for — tossing aside the laws and norms of government solely to benefit himself.
“Screw Amazon,” Trump reportedly told then-Defense Secretary James Mattis in the summer of 2018, directing him to deny Amazon the contract — according to an account from Mattis’ former speechwriter, who wrote about it in a book. On Monday, Amazon asked to depose Mattis to see if this was true.
Trump’s animosity toward Amazon, Bezos and the Bezos-owned Washington Post is well-documented. But what was most potent about Amazon’s legal attack is how the company cited a much larger pattern of self-dealing from Trump in making its case. One example: His administration is currently under investigation because he allegedly rigged a $400 million contract for the border wall, and also separately for blocking the move of the FBI headquarters, which is currently across the street from one of Trump’s hotels.
As if on cue, Trump incredibly weighed in, by tweet, on the upcoming sentencing in the criminal trial of one of his own campaign advisers, Roger Stone. This has led to a crisis at the Department of Justice, with four U.S. attorneys either resigning or withdrawing from the case.
I have no idea if Amazon deserves the $10 billion contract, but is it the one to finally make the bigger story stick?
In the end, it’s going to be up to voters. But by standing up to Trump, if nothing else, Amazon seems to have finally hit on a surefire way to earn some good feelings back in its hometown.
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