Company Seeks More Deals Despite Trump Conflict

According to emails obtained by the UK-based newspaper The Guardian, an Amazon official privately met with the U.S. administration to advise on a planned internet portal for purchasing everything from paper to furniture.Amazon appears to have the inside track on the website design, as its executive Anne Rung has been communicating with a top GSA official.

Landing a deal with the U.S. government on the portal website could earn Amazon billions in revenue.

The lobbying efforts for that and other projects began with the Obama Administration but continued under Trump, in spite of his ire towards Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, a publication that has been highly critical of his governing.

Behind the scenes, Amazon been working for years to become a top government contractor, most recently seeking a $10 billion defense contract for a project known as JEDI, according to CNN. JEDI, which stands for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, becoming a cloud computing host for data operations supporting military missions around the world.

Amazon Web Services already earned $6.68 billion in the third quarter of 2018 and claims a third of the worldwide cloud market. Securing government deals would catapult Amazon into the Google stratosphere for U.S. government impact, according to the CNN story.

Amazon spent $9.4 million in U.S. lobbying in 2018 and announced plans to open two headquarters nearby in the Virginia cities of Arlington and Crystal City, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks corporate influence peddling in the U.S. government.