LAS VEGAS — Amazon is gearing up for battle with the U.S. government over the process by which Microsoft was awarded a reported $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. “We feel pretty strongly that it was not adjudicated fairly,” Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy said during a press conference at the AWS re:Invent show.

“If you do a truly objective and detailed apples-to-apples comparison of the platforms, you don’t end up in the spot where that decision was made,” he said.

Within weeks of the Pentagon’s surprise decision to award the contract to Microsoft, AWS filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to challenge how the bid was granted to its nearest cloud competitor.

“Most of our customers tell us that we’re a couple years ahead, both with regard to functionality and maturity,” Jassy said. AWS was considered a heavy favorite to win the JEDI contract, but a Pentagon inspector general investigation into potential “misconduct” and the ongoing public feud between President Donald Trump and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos changed that dynamic significantly.

“You ended up with a situation where there was significant political interference,” Jassy said. “When you have a sitting president who’s willing to share openly his disdain for a company and the leader of that company it makes it really difficult for government agencies, including the [Department of Defense], to make an objective decision without fear of reprisal.”

The contentious process and eventual decision is “really risky for the country and for democracy,” Jassy said. “We’re talking about the national security of our country and modernizing their technology platform — the foundation on which all those applications that are going to be used to protect our country. You have to make sure that those decisions are made truly objectively.”

Jassy explained that he has a deep understanding of the respective offerings from AWS’ competitors, including Microsoft, and that the criteria for JEDI should have resulted in a win for AWS.

“I feel pretty strongly that it was not adjudicated fairly and I know the conclusion we make is that there was a lot of political interference there,” he said.