Trump asked Defense Secretary Mattis to 'screw Amazon' out of Pentagon's JEDI cloud contract

News of Trump's bid to derail Amazon's JEDI cloud contract bid stands to

President Trump was personally involved in the Pentagon ' s $10 billion JEDI cloud tender, ordering former Defense Secretary James Mattis to "screw Amazon" out of the contract.

That ' s according to the upcoming biography of James Mattis, entitled Holding The Line: Inside Trump's Pentagon with Secretary Mattis according to military-focused website Task & Purpose, which got hold of an advance copy of the book.

Trump called Mattis during summer 2018 and ordered him to 'screw Amazon' out of the JEDI contract

The book is written by Guy Snodgrass, Mattis ' former speechwriter, who talks in detail about Mattis ' tenure as Secretary of Defense.

"Relaying the story to us during Small Group, Mattis said, 'We're not going to do that. This will be done by the book, both legally and ethically,'" Snodgrass wrote in the book.

Earlier this week, a spokeswoman for Mattis stated that Snodgrass was a "junior staffer" who had "no role in decision making".

Responding to that, Snodgrass brandished a citation he had received and stated that he played a leading role in the Pentagon's messaging. According to Snodgrass ' s book, Trump called Mattis during summer 2018 and ordered him to "screw Amazon" out of the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) contract.

The Pentagon has now awarded the JEDI contract to Microsoft.

The JEDI cloud infrastructure project was initiated by the Department of Defence in a bid to put together a general-purpose cloud service for the US military.

By shifting some of its IT into the cloud, the Pentagon expects to be able to use the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, and to boost its technical abilities on the battleground.

Initially, Amazon was seen as the favourite in winning the JEDI contract, but in July President Trump said that he would look into the contract as some of the big technology firms, including IBM and Oracle, had complained about the bidding process.

IBM even claimed that some government officials, including those at Pentagon, were conspiring to help Amazon to win the lucrative cloud computing deal.

In July, a US federal judge dismissed Oracle's challenge to the Pentagon's JEDI mega-cloud contract. In his ruling, Senior Judge Eric Bruggink said that there was no evidence to prove any sort of bias in the procurement process for JEDI contract, and added that Oracle had also failed to prove a conflict in the procurement process.

Since becoming the president of the US, Trump has constantly expressed his displeasure with Amazon and its boss Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. Trump has regularly criticised the publication for its coverage of his administration.

Trump has also accused Amazon of not paying its fair share of taxes to the government and also taking advantages of the US Postal Service.

"We're surprised about this conclusion," an AWS spokesperson told CNBC about Pentagon ' s decision to award JEDI contract to Microsoft.

"AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion."

"We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure," the company added.