Trump Should Keep Out of Pentagon Cloud Bid, Senator Warner Says
(Bloomberg) -- The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee is urging President Donald Trump to rein in his influence over a Pentagon cloud contract valued at as much as $10 billion.
Mark Warner of Virginia said in a tweet on Friday that the president shouldn't use his power to hurt his media critics, in an apparent reference to front-runner Amazon.com Inc., whose founder Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post.
New Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Thursday ordered a review of the Pentagon's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract after Trump endorsed criticism that Amazon was given an unfair advantage for the deal.
For More: Pentagon Chief to Review Cloud Contract Trump Says Favors Amazon
“For the President to use the power of his office to punish critics in the media would be a complete abuse of power,” Warner said in the tweet.
But Esper's spokesman said Friday that Trump hasn't dictated a course of action on the disputed contract known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program, or JEDI.
“The secretary was not ordered by the President to make any specific determination about JEDI, period,” press secretary Jonathan Hoffman said in an email. He said Esper “reiterated that the contract must meet the needs of the warfighter and guarantee the best deal possible for taxpayers” and “the secretary will work to ensure those two vital goals are fairly accomplished.”
Trump stunned tech companies, the Defense Department and lawmakers this month when he openly questioned whether the pending contract is being competitively bid. He said he'd heard complaints from companies such as Microsoft Corp., the No. 2 contender, and Oracle Corp., which was eliminated from the competition earlier this year. Both have argued that the terms favored Amazon.
Trump has long denounced Bezos in tweets, criticizing him for the rates his company pays the U.S. Postal Service to deliver Amazon packages and his ownership of what Trump calls “the Amazon Washington Post.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Naomi Nix in Washington at nnix1@bloomberg.net;Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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