Silicon Valley’s growing influence over government has extended deep into the Pentagon, placing America’s national security in jeopardy.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the chamber’s Judiciary Committee, is pressing the Pentagon to reopen its investigation into a former official whose ties to e-commerce giant Amazon raise questions about ethics behind a government contract signed while she was in the Department of Defense.
According to a report by Breitbart, Grassley has uncovered new information relevant to a closed DOD probe into Sally Donnelly, who served as the senior advisor to Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis during the Trump administration.
Donnelly was under investigation by the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DOD OIG) for her financial ties to British financier André Pienaar, receiving over $1 million of payments from him while she served in the Pentagon.
Pienaar has done business with Amazon, and Donnelly served in the administration at a time when Amazon was seeking to land a $10 million contract for an ambitious Department of Defense cloud-computing project known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI.
Donnelly sold her share of SBD Advisors, an Amazon consulting firm, just prior to entering the DOD in 2017.
Donnelly, who worked as a Time magazine journalist for 20 years prior to going into the Pentagon for the first time in 2007, has been a Defense fixture since that time, having served in the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. She currently serves as a Pentagon advisor as a member of the Defense Business Board.
At the conclusion of its investigation into the matter on April 13, 2020, the DOD OIG concluded in its final report: “We determined that Ms. Donnelly did not violate any ethical agreements and obligations regarding Office of Government Ethics financial disclosures, [and] did not give preferential treatment to Amazon officials or restrict access to Secretary Mattis for other industry leaders.”
But according to new evidence obtained by Grassley, Donnelly failed to disclose just who had purchased her consulting firm — something Grassley argues was pertinent to the DOD OIG probe and could have affected its conclusion.
As Breitbart notes:
After pressing the DOD OIG for the Purchase and Sale Agreement for Donnelly’s company, Grassley found that the DOD OIG only had a copy with the identity of the purchaser’s name redacted, and that the DOD OIG had argued to him that the identity of the purchaser was not relevant to their investigation. Grassley said he finally obtained an unredacted copy of the Purchase and Sale Agreement in October 2022 — long after the DOD OIG ended its investigation — which revealed that an entity named VMAP Investor, LLC (VMAP) had purchased her firm. The “AP” in VMAP are the initials of its part-owner, Andre Pienaar.
… Pienaar is not only the CEO and founder of C5 Capital — one of Donnelly’s clients — but at the time he was also dating — and later married — the Amazon Web Services executive who was then in charge of the company’s bid for the lucrative defense contract, Teresa Carlson.
“Knowledge of the entity that purchased her firm is relevant and central to the question of whether a conflict of interest existed and could have substantively affected the protocols required to wall off Sally Donnelly from potential and actual conflicts of interest while employed at DoD,” Grassley wrote to the DOD OIG.
The senator added, “Based on information collected for this investigation, the DoD OIG’s conclusion concerning Ms. Donnelly’s lack of financial connection to C5 appears to be inaccurate. Indeed, two senior C5 officials, including the founder of C5 Capital, were involved in the purchase of SBD Advisors LLC–connections that existed while Donnelly was at DoD and received payments from the sale of her company.”
Another individual involved in the creation of VMAP, per Grassley’s findings, was Vincent Mai, the chairman and CEO of the private equity firm Cranemere and an individual owner of C5 Holdings in Luxembourg.
Originally, the JEDI contract fell under investigation and was canceled. But under Biden, it was brought back to life as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, or JWCC, and awarded to four companies — including Amazon — at $9 billion over five years. Google, Microsoft, and Oracle are also on board.
“The purpose of this contract is to provide the Department of Defense with enterprise-wide globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” the DOD said of JWCC.
Is it wise for the Pentagon to trust its cloud-computing needs — and thus, the lives of service members and the American citizens they are fighting to protect — with companies friendly to the very foreign adversaries our military is supposedly guarding against?
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are all cozy with Communist China — the country that recently sent what many say was a spy balloon over the United States — a balloon that may have been put together with the help of American manufacturing.
If China, by means of its friends in Silicon Valley, is already being handed the reins of the Pentagon’s cloud, then any future conflict between China and the United States will be nothing more than kabuki theater. Beijing has already won.
