/ An aerial view of the Pentagon, the Potomac river, and parts of Washington, DC, taken back before a pandemic started keeping most of those cars in the commuter lot at home.
The Department of Defense’s internal probe into a controversial $ billion billion-computing contract connected that the process by which the contract was awarded was proper and not influenced by President Donald Trump or members of his administration — despite the fact that the White House declined to cooperate with the investigation.
The DoD Office of Inspector General circulated the report (a
– page (PDF ) on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract (JEDI) award internally on Monday and made it public today. In the end, the inspectors determined the evidence showed DoD personnel who made the decision were neither pressured by the White House directly nor by senior DoD officials who may have been in communication with the White House, even though “media swirl” made it seem otherwise .
Many enterprise computing vendors threw their hats in the ring for the JEDI contract. By April 2020, the shortlist was down to two finalists: Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Industry experts and assess largely expected Amazon to win the contract and were generally surprised when the Pentagon sealed the deal with Microsoft in October.
Amazon sued in December, basically alleging that Microsoft won because Trump personally hates Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. In more legal terms, Amazon said the administration applied “improper pressure” to block AWS from winning the contract, citing instructions from Trump to former Defense Secretary James Mattis to “screw Amazon,” as well as other tweets and comments about Bezos and his company.
The Pentagon in March said it would “reconsider” parts of its decision-making process, after Amazon won a preliminary injunction blocking the DoD and Microsoft from moving forward for the time being.
The report very explicitly does
“We carefully considered this response and connected it would not be an appropriate and practical way to conduct our review, because there was no assurance as to which questions would be answered, it would undly delay the report, it would not allow for an interview and inevitable follow up questions, and it would not assure that we would be receiving full information from the witnesses, “the investigators write. “We therefore declined to proceed in this manner.” In short, the White House threw up so many roadblocks to get any information that the investigators gave up.
The DoD inspector general who oversaw the investigation and report, Glenn Fine, was abruptly removed from the position on April 6 after he was tapped to head the federal panel created by Congress to review management of the $ 2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package. Fine had held the role for more than four years.
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