Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., gives his opening statement as former special counsel Robert Mueller testifies before the House Judiciary Committee hearing on his report on Russian election interference, on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, July 24, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

While all this other impeachment stuff has been going on, it’s still politics as usual in Washington D.C. in virtually every other regard.

Did you know, for example, that there has been a been tech battle over a massive Department of Defense contract for cloud computing services? It’s true, and it’s led to one of the frankly funniest political strategies I’ve ever seen.

A company called Oracle was trying to beat out Amazon for the contract. They did not win, and apparently they are very upset about it. The contract has not actually been awarded (the finalists are Amazon and Microsoft), but they are so upset that they’ve admitted to contributing to a Hillary Clinton-Chuck Schumer consultant-run anti-Amazon astroturf effort that possibly isn’t complying with lobbying rules in some sort of quasi-trolling effort.

Well, it seems that that’s not enough, and Oracle is just out for blood. They are also doing some serious lobbying of the Trump Administration, who will be awarding the contract. Not entirely sure what their goal is outside of “Screw Amazon over!” because by everything I’ve seen it’s impossible for them to get the contract at this point. They have also decided to essentially bankrolling Rep. Jerry Nadler’s 2020 campaign.

Obviously, Nadler is the chair of the Judiciary Committee, so his favor is something Oracle does need to win over at some point. However, it’s probably not the greatest strategy to lobby both the Trump Administration AND Jerry Nadler when the latter has been openly calling for Trump’s impeachment since pretty much the beginning. It just seems like you might alienate one in promoting the other, and the former definitely controls what happens in the Department of Defense.

Keep in mind, too, that this isn’t a situation where Oracle has been a major contributor to Nadler in the past. They went from not ranking among Nadler’s top donors in the past two election cycles to being his fourth-largest donor for the 2020 election.

Trump is definitely not the sort to condone anyone playing nice with the enemy and to Trump, who has admitted in the past that he donated to whatever politician he thought would help him out most, if he were made aware of Oracle’s spending habits I very much doubt Oracle would be getting a government contract as long as Trump holds the White House.