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Call it a “JEDI” mind trick.
A month before the Pentagon announced a shift from Microsoft to Amazon cloud services for a major defense initiative, Paul Pelosi just happened to buy call options on Amazon stock.
The husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) placed somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million, according to the Speaker’s required latest financial disclosure report, filed on 2 July, 2021.
The timing of the call options has been called out as an all too typical “coincidence”, benefitting a political insider. But Breitbart News went further. They tracked past disclosure statements and found that Paul Pelosi has a history of purchasing Amazon call options around JEDI program-related milestones, dating back to 2017.
In that year, the Pentagon began looking for a cloud solution that could enable faster access and exchange of data. The program has been dubbed “JEDI” (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure).
On July 26, 2018, the Pentagon issued its final request for proposal (RFP) for the JEDI program. On July 27, 2018, Pelosi made the first purchase of Amazon call options. On October 12, 2018, a disclosure said he would buy more call options, potentially worth $6,000,000.
Pelosi also purchased Amazon in 2019, and in May of 2021, after Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in April that the Pentagon was “reviewing” the JEDI contract. At that time, Microsoft had been considered the likely beneficiary of JEDI related business. The May 2021 call options were worth as much as $1 million.
According to government procurement portal website Nextgov, the JEDI contract has been won twice by Microsoft, but an injunction issued by a federal court in response to Amazon Web Services’ continuing JEDI protest has blocked any meaningful activity.
Industry observers, including those at Raymond James, say the Pentagon’s shift from Microsoft to Amazon is a major boost for the latter:
“We believe this is a clear positive for Amazon and potentially negative for the third-party data centers… We believe the shift to Amazon further cements its position as a leading cloud provider, particularly to government agencies.”
So far, Nancy Pelosi has personally declined comment on her husband’s Amazon bets. But a spokesperson told Fox Business that “The speaker has no involvement or prior knowledge of these transactions.”