Trump: Administration to review Pentagon computer contract

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Trump: Administration to review Pentagon computer contract

2019-07-19 05:28 Last Updated At：05:30

President Donald Trump said Thursday that the administration will "take a very long look" at a massive multibillion-dollar contract the Pentagon is preparing to award for a cloud computing system, citing "tremendous complaints" he's heard about the process.

Amazon Web Services Inc., a division of Amazon, and Microsoft Corp. are finalists for the contract estimated to be worth up to $10 billion over a decade.

Trump said during an unrelated event at the White House that companies that are no longer in the running to land the deal, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, have lodged complaints about the process.

Republican lawmakers troubled by the Pentagon's handling of the contract also took their concerns directly to the president.

"I'm getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon," Trump said when he was asked about the matter during an Oval Office appearance with the Dutch prime minister. "They're saying it wasn't competitively bid."

"We're looking at it very seriously," the president said. "It's a very big contract, one of the biggest ever given having to do with the cloud and having to do with a lot of other things."

Trump said some of the "greatest companies in the world" were among those complaining about Amazon, and he said the administration will look "very closely" at the contract because "I have had very few things where there's been such complaining."

Trump is a critic of Amazon, the e-commerce retailer owned by Jeff Bezos. Bezos also owns The Washington Post, and Trump has criticized the paper's coverage of the administration.

The president's comments injected new uncertainty into a project the Defense Department has said is vital to maintaining the U.S. military's technological advantage over adversaries. Whichever company wins the contract will have the monumental task of storing and processing vast amounts of classified data. The Pentagon says it will enable troops to advance the use of artificial intelligence in warfare.

Oracle and IBM were eliminated from an earlier round of competition, leaving Amazon and Microsoft as the two finalists.

Amazon and Microsoft declined to comment Thursday on Trump's remarks. Oracle didn't immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

IBM said in a statement Thursday that it "has long raised serious concerns about the structure of the JEDI procurement" and continues to believe the Defense Department "would be best served by a multi-cloud strategy" involving multiple cloud systems operated by different companies.

IBM did not say whether it had shared those concerns with the White House. Both IBM and Oracle formally protested the process last year.

A federal judge last week tossed out a second challenge by Oracle alleging that the bidding process was rigged in Amazon's favor, and some in Congress have expressed concerns about potential conflicts of interest. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida sent a letter last week to White House national security adviser John Bolton asking that the Pentagon delay awarding the contract, contending that the process suffered from a "lack of competition" and the use of "arbitrary criteria and standards for bidders" that could waste taxpayer dollars and "fail to provide our warfighters with the best technology solutions."

Rubio had also expressed concerns about plans to award the contract to a single vendor.

The Pentagon has said it plans to award the contract as soon as Aug. 23.

Rep. James Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said Thursday he has full confidence in the Defense Department's cloud strategy and that it's important that the project be allowed to move forward.

Langevin said in an emailed statement that it would be "wholly inappropriate" for Trump or any member of Congress to interfere in the procurement process, especially since the courts and the Government Accountability Office - the watchdog for Congress - have rejected challenges to the Pentagon's plans.

Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a defense-oriented think tank based in Virginia, said it's not unusual for Trump to publicly raise concerns about a defense equipment contract, as Trump did weeks before he took office over the contract with Boeing for an updated version of Air Force One.

But Goure said it's rare for Trump to actually reverse a Pentagon decision, especially one backed by a legal opinion.

"I would be incredibly surprised if the president decided to unilaterally cancel this," said Goure, whose institute receives funding from Amazon. "I think once he sees the process, or the process is explained to him and the document is explained to him, I think this will all go away."

Follow Darlene Superville and Matt O'Brien on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap and http://www.twitter.com/mattoyeah

Takeaways from AP's investigation into Russia's Africa Corps in Mali

DAKAR. Senegal (AP) — Dozens of people who have fled Mali tell The Associated Press that a new Russian military unit that replaced the Wagner mercenary group this year is carrying out abuses, including rapes and beheadings, as it teams up with Mali’s military to hunt down extremists.

The refugees said the Africa Corps, which reports to Russia's Defense Ministry, is using the same tactics as Wagner. Their accounts, collected during rare access to the Mauritanian border, have not been reported by international media until now.

West Africa’s vast Sahel region has become the deadliest place in the world for extremism. The military governments of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in recent years have turned from Western allies to Russia for help combating the fighters affiliated with al-Qaida or the Islamic State group.

The Africa Corps replaced Wagner six months ago. That sparked hope for less brutality among weary civilians who the United Nations says have been abused by all sides. But refugees described a new reign of terror by the “white men” in the vast and largely lawless territory. The AP spoke to 34 refugees. Most spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Here are takeaways from the AP investigation.

Two refugees showed videos of villages they said were burned by Africa Corps. Two others said they found bodies of loved ones with liver and kidneys missing. Previous AP reporting has tracked social media channels, likely administered by Wagner members, that shared images of men in military uniform butchering corpses of what appear to be Malian civilians, hacking out organs and posing with severed limbs.

“It’s a scorched-earth policy,” said a Malian village chief who fled to Mauritania last month for the second time. “The soldiers speak to no one. Anyone they see, they shoot. No questions, no warning. People don’t even know why they are being killed.”

He added: “There is no difference between Wagner and Africa Corps.”

Malian authorities never publicly acknowledged Wagner’s presence, and have not acknowledged Africa Corps. But Russian state media in recent weeks have published reports from Mali praising Africa Corps for defending the country from “terrorists," and Russia’s Foreign Ministry has confirmed that the unit is active “at the request of the Malian authorities,” providing ground escorts, search-and-rescue operations and other work.

Russia’s Defense Ministry did not respond to AP questions.

Reported abuses against civilians intensified when Wagner teamed up with the underfunded Malian army in 2021. According to private security analysts, Mali paid Russia about $10 million a month for Wagner’s assistance. While the group was never officially under the Kremlin’s command, it had close ties to Russia’s intelligence and military.

Moscow began developing the Africa Corps as a rival to Wagner after its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash in 2023 following his brief armed rebellion in Russia that challenged the rule of President Vladimir Putin.

It is unclear whether Mali’s agreement remains the same for Africa Corps. Much is unknown about the unit's operations, including the number of fighters, which analysts estimate at around 2,000.

Not all Africa Corps fighters are Russian. Several refugees told the AP they saw Black men speaking foreign languages. The European Council on Foreign Relations in a recent report said the unit recruits from Russia, Belarus and African states.

The hunt by Africa Corps and Malian forces for militants intensified in September, when JNIM fighters imposed an unprecedented blockade on fuel into Mali from neighboring countries.

Experts say it’s impossible to know how many people are being killed and assaulted in Mali, especially in remote areas, while journalists and aid workers have limited access to the country.

“There is a lot of people raped, attacked, killed. Families are separated, there is no doubt about that,” said Sukru Cansizoglu, the representative in Mauritania for the U.N. refugee agency. But “it is sometimes difficult to really pinpoint who are the perpetrators.”

Civilians, under pressure from both the militants and the Africa Corps and Malian fighters, are “between a rock and a hard place,” said Heni Nsaibia from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

As one refugee put it: “If you don’t tell the army you saw jihadists, the army will kill you. But if you tell them, the jihadists will find you and kill you.”

Legal experts said the shift from Wagner to Africa Corps makes the Russian government directly accountable for its military unit's actions.

“Despite the rebranding, there is striking continuity in personnel, commanders, tactics and even insignia between Wagner and Africa Corps,” said Lindsay Freeman, senior director of international accountability at the UC Berkeley School of Law’s Human Rights Center, which has monitored the conflict in Mali.

Because Africa Corps is embedded in Russia’s Ministry of Defense, it can be treated as an organ of the Russian state under international law, Freeman said. “That means any war crimes committed by Africa Corps in Mali are, in principle, attributable to the Russian government under the rules on state responsibility.”