Amazon v. Donald J. Trump: A Massive Defense Contract Award Tainted by the Appearance of Impropriety

Rodney Sweetland, Vice President and General Counsel, Camris International Inc., USA

An unconventional U.S. president personally attacking the CEO of Amazon, one of the country’s largest and most impactful companies, is salacious news. Important public policy considerations are implicated when those attacks extend to that company’s efforts at obtaining a major Defense Department contract. Add tech titans IBM, Google, Microsoft and Oracle to the list of actors in the dispute and the narrative completes its transformation from a paradigmatic government contracts award protest to a Homeric epic. This article will examine the litigation by Amazon Web Services (’Amazon