American Military News by Ryan Morgan May 06, 2021
On Tuesday, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) sent letters to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and the Acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense Sean O’Donnell, questioning whether a Pentagon official who received more than $1 million in undisclosed payments from an Amazon consultant unlawfully influenced the Pentagon to consider Amazon Web Services for its $10 billion JEDI defense cloud computing contract.
In their letter to Garland, Lee and Buck wrote, “We are aware that a senior DoD official, Sally Donnelly, who previously performed consulting work for Amazon’s cloud computing business, received more than $1 million in undisclosed payments while serving at the DoD from another Amazon consultant, Andre Pienaar, which she failed to disclose until after she resigned her position at DoD.”
Lee and Buck described the payments to Donnelly as potentially criminal conflicts of interest and bribery.
“These actions are alarming for multiple reasons. In addition to obvious procurement integrity issues, there appear to be multiple potential violations of Federal criminal laws that have yet to be investigated in any meaningful way, including potential violations of 18 U.S.C. §§ 203, 205, and 208 (criminal conflicts of interest); 18 U.S.C. § 201(b)(1) (bribery of a public official),” Lee and Buck wrote to Garland.
More:
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/05/gop-lawmakers-demand-doj-investigate-alleged-amazon-1-million-bribery-of-defense-official/
