This article is a collaboration between Fortune
and ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization.
© Department of Defense/Senior Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz
Then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter gives Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos a tour of the Pentagon during a visit on May 5, 2016.
On Aug. 8, 2017, Roma Laster, a Pentagon employee responsible for policing conflicts of interest, emailed an urgent warning to the chief of staff of then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Several department employees had arranged for Jeff Bezos, the CEO of
Amazon, to be sworn into an influential Pentagon advisory board despite the fact that, in the year since he'd been nominated, Bezos had never completed a required background check to obtain a security clearance.
Mattis was about to fly to the West Coast, where he would personally swear Bezos in at Amazon's headquarters before moving on to meetings with executives from
Google and
Apple. Soon phone calls and emails began bouncing around the Pentagon. Security clearances are no trivial matter to defense officials; they exist to ensure that people with access to sensitive information aren't, say, vulnerable to blackmail and don't have conflicts of interest.
Laster also contended that it was a "noteworthy exception" for Mattis to perform the ceremony. Secretaries of defense, she wrote, don't hold swearing-in events.
Laster's alarms triggered fear among Pentagon brass that Mattis would be seen as doing a special favor for Bezos, which could put him in hot water with President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly proclaimed his antipathy to Bezos, mainly because of his ownership of
The Washington Post. The swearing-in was canceled only hours before it was scheduled to occur. (This episode, never previously reported, is based on interviews with six people familiar with the matter. An Amazon spokesperson said the company was told that Bezos did not need a security clearance and that the company provided all requested information.)
Comment: Perhaps it is not so much that Silicon Valley has seduced DC, but your friendly neighborhood intelligence companies. See also: