Oracle appeals federal court’s JEDI dismissal

Oracle will take its protest of the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud contract to a federal appeals court.

The company filed a motion Monday to appeal a U.S. Court of Federal Claims decision last month denying Oracle’s lawsuit against the Department of Defense’s development and handling of JEDI.

The judge ruled in July against Oracle’s claims that a potential conflict of interest between DOD and intervenor Amazon Web Services impacted the acquisition strategy and that DOD’s requirement of gate criteria, which Oracle failed to meet, prejudiced the potential $10 billion cloud contract. However, the judge found the justification for issuing a single award for the contract to be “flawed.”

In a statement, Oracle focuses on the judge’s issue with the single-award justification as its grounds for appeal.

“The Court of Federal Claims opinion in the JEDI bid protest describes the JEDI procurement as unlawful, notwithstanding dismissal of the protest solely on the legal technicality of Oracle’s purported lack of standing,” says the statement, attributed to Oracle general counsel Dorian Daley. “Federal procurement laws specifically bar single award procurements such as JEDI absent satisfying specific, mandatory requirements, and the Court in its opinion clearly found DoD did not satisfy these requirements.”

Daley also again alleges conflicts of interest that “violate the law and undermine the public trust.”

“As a threshold matter, we believe that the determination of no standing is wrong as a matter of law, and the very analysis in the opinion compels a determination that the procurement was unlawful on several grounds,” he says.

This appeal emerges as JEDI faces a series of internal challenges at the Pentagon — new Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is undertaking a review of the contract, and the department inspector general is conducting an investigation into the alleged conflicts of interest and the acquisition strategy and requirements.

Esper’s decision to review the contract came after a number of Republican lawmakers urged him and Trump to review the acquisition. Lobbyists for Oracle appear to be at the center of the orchestrated efforts to derail JEDI, passing a document around Washington with a flowchart titled “A Conspiracy to Create a Ten Year DoD Cloud Monopoly,” according to a CNN report.

This will mark Oracle’s third time protesting the contract. In addition to the lawsuit in federal claims court, the Government Accountability Office also denied the company’s pre-award protest late last year. Oracle’s appeal goes to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.