Trump ordered Defense chief to 'screw Amazon' out of $10B contract, book says

cnet.com

23 points·obituary_latte··6 comments

Possibly, but there’s also an historic antipathy between the DOD and CIA: the CIA has worked closely with Amazon building their datacenters and the NSA (part of the DOD) has worked closely with Microsoft in the past, especially with the construction of their San Antonio data center. When the deal was finalized for building the San Antonio Azure datacenter the NSA quietly approached the contractor and said “we’ll have one of those too, right across the street from where you’re building one for Microsoft.”

Could you point to some references for further reading?

This goes back at least to the early 1960s and the Kennedy administration when Kennedy allegedly sought to dissolve the CIA and roll all intelligence activities into the Department of Defense. In more recent times, Bush Jr. tried to heal the DOD/CIA rift by putting for NSA director in as the CIA director. That didn't really go well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/10/washington/10cambone.html

Title is a bit misleading,apparently James Mattis said he will not follow that order.

And then Mattis resigned 10 months ago due to frequent clashes with Trump. I do wonder if Trump ordered Esper to "screw Amazon", and if so how did/would he react.

True, but I kinda glad AWS doesn't have a monopoly vendor lockin on the US Gov and I am glad the alternative was not Google. With some of Trump's ridiculous orders like this one,I think they'll say "yes" at first and ignore his ordet knowing they can find an excuse if he follows up on the execution.

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