Amazon (AMZN  ) is suing the United States Federal Government over the terms of a recent $10 billion contract from the Pentagon. The Department of Defense claims that they ran a completely fair and impartial process in the awarding of this grant money, but orders to protect proprietary information are keeping the details about this situation under wraps. However, Microsoft (MSFT  ) also claims that its dealings with the Pentagon were fair, making this a difficult situation to interpret.

This contract relates to the JEDI project, which stands for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud. This project would have laid down a more modern approach to American defense infrastructure, considering many technological components of American defense are based on technology from the 1990s or earlier. At first, Amazon was considered the heavy favorite to win this project, but Microsoft came out as the surprise winner, leading to accusations from Amazon. In particular, Amazon claims that political favoritism coming from the White House led the Department of Defense to pick Microsoft due to a less critical atmosphere.

Amazon has filed several motions to keep the details of this lawsuit out of the eyes of the public. This makes sense, as information that pertains to national defense has been kept away from the public historically. However, Amazon's accusations of favoritism from Pentagon contractors is unusual, as is President Donald Trump's involvement in the bidding process. Earlier in the year, Trump announced that he would be personally involved in the bidding process for this defense contract. Amazon has submitted several pieces of evidence, both from the Trump campaign and from his actions as President, that suggest that he would enact pressure against Amazon within the Pentagon. There is also video evidence from the confirmation hearings of the Chief Information Officer for the Department of Defense that Amazon has tried to submit into evidence. However, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has claimed no impropriety in the awarding of those contracts and is expected to testify in the upcoming trial.