Amazon Web Services Inc. will protest the U.S. Department of Defense’s decision to award a key cloud computing contract to its rival Microsoft Corp., the company confirmed Thursday.

AWS filed paperwork with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims regarding its legal protest last Friday. The Federal Times reported that AWS Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy held an all-hands meeting today, where he said he plans to “protest the decision and push the government to shine a light on what really happened.”

Moreover, he referenced political pressures from President Donald Trump, who has had a longtime beef with Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos because of Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post, which has run many articles critical of the president.

The winner of the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract will build and maintain a cloud computing platform that’s intended to overhaul the DOD’s information technology infrastructure. Microsoft was officially awarded the contract on Oct. 25 following a controversial two-year selection process.

Five companies had initially bid for the contract. Google LLC eventually decided to pull out of the bidding, while IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp. both filed protests alleging bias in the awards process after seeing their bids rejected.

AWS was for a long time believed to be the front-runner to land the contract, and the decision to award it to Microsoft came as a big surprise. But there is evidence pointing to the involvement of Trump in that decision, Amazon said.

“Numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors and unmistakable bias — and it’s important that these matters be examined and rectified,” a spokesperson for AWS said.

Trump has frequently criticized Bezos. He was previously reported as saying that his administration had received “tremendous complaints from other companies” about the JEDI bidding process.

More recently, a new book, “Holding The Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis,” claims that Trump told his former Defense Secretary James Mattis to “screw Amazon” on the contract.

The reports of Trump’s apparent interference give Amazon a good case to argue that the bidding process was improper. “We feel pretty strongly that it wasn’t adjudicated fairly,” Jassy reportedly said in the meeting.

Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. told SiliconANGLE the timing of Amazon’s announcement that it intends to protest the decision is significant as it means it won’t get lost in the weekend lull. That shows Amazon clearly wants to make a splash, he said. And it comes as Trump is under a microscope during impeachment hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Although it’s seen as unlikely that Amazon would win an appeal, it has a few things in its favor, King said. He noted that AWS was initially expected to win the contract, and had already earned the trust and respect of JEDI management.

“That was reversed after Oracle and others stepped in, protesting that the presence of a former AWS exec on the JEDI committee had weighted the selection process in the company’s favor — claims that have never been substantiated,” he said.

King also pointed to the clear enmity that Trump holds for Amazon. He added the fact that AWS was awarded its DOD Level 5 security certification in June 2016, well before Azure received its Level 5 rating in May 2017, was also in its favor.

“AWS has a good deal of evidence suggesting that while it was following the JEDI rules in good faith, competitors and grudge-holding political hacks corrupted the contract process,” King said. “With this strong a case, if the protest fails it’s hard to see how JEDI, Azure and the DOD can come out of this with their hands clean.”

Other analysts told SiliconANGLE said the protest by AWS was to be expected.

“I am not at all surprised as every government vendor that doesn’t get a major contract does this,” said Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy. “I think it is fair for AWS to ask for more public discourse over this, just as I am sure Microsoft would have asked for the same had it not won, just as we saw with IBM and Oracle.”

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said AWS’ argument has some merit because it’s widely perceived to be the market leader in infrastructure-as-a-service. He also said he was concerned that the Pentagon only wanted to use a single IaaS provider, instead of multiple providers for different services.

“Commercial enterprises with small and less critical loads typically use two or more IaaS vendors,” Mueller said. “So it’s disconcerting for the free world that the U.S. government is sticking with a single vendor.”

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