"A federal court said on Wednesday that it did not dismiss the possibility that former President Donald J. Trump interfered in the awarding of a military cloud-computing contract worth $10 billion, a decision that could result in the overhaul of a long-running effort to modernize technology at the Defense Department."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/technology/trump-jedi-pen...

What?

A couple of points. The whitehouse blocked any disclosures of discussions / pressure even to the inspector general. They also issued notices to staff not to talk to IG. That's a pretty darn good sign that there WAS involvement by the whitehouse.

The DoD is dropping this case because they were asked to reveal some of this information. Instead of disclosing it, they elect to cancel the contract. This was a specific issue in the current case, would DoD have to reveal this type of communication from whitehouse.

Yes - people claim no pressure / no involvement - but it's blindingly obvious that there is a very good chance there was pressure.

I have past experience with govt contracting so have a sense for what the flows look like.

Contract selection put on hold, involvement of a political person (probably esper here). Ban on anyone talking about the potential discussion to internal auditors. Those are all the red flags.

There isn’t any evidence but people adjust their priors based on historical conduct, and at some point you lose the benefit of the doubt.

I'm sorry but the second these words left his mouth obviously indicating his displeasure with the likelihood of Amazon winning the contract he had influenced the outcome.

“I will be asking them to look at it very closely to see what’s going on because I have had very few things where there’s been such complaining,” Trump said. "Not only complaining from the media — or at least asking questions about it from the media — but complaining from different companies like Microsoft and Oracle and IBM. Great companies are complaining about it. So we’re going to take a look at it. We’ll take a very strong look at it. Thank you very much everybody.”

He head already shown at this point that he was an old boys club type of guy that would go after anyone who disagreed and support anyone who kissed his ass, so anyone having a hand in the selection of the winner of the contract that wanted favor with the president would obviously attempt to influence the outcome to not be Amazon.

He should have kept his mouth shut on such a massive pending contract, but it's pretty obvious by now that keeping his mouth shut isn't something he's physically capable of doing.

Now instead of having started on a crucial service that is needed by our military we're looking at likely further years of delays. All because the president was butthurt over some mean words in a newspaper.

> Except there was never any evidence that Trump got involved, even after multiple independent reviews.

That doesn't matter. We're not talking about criminal proceedings, where anyone has to be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. This is, at most, a civil law process. And it's the DoD canceling its own contract, which they are probably allowed to do for whatever reason.