THREAD: A former senior Pentagon official said Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s pricing director, had over the span of his career “saved the Department of Defense many billions of dollars.” yhoo.it/2o9z2Mh 
Trump’s interest in negotiating better prices for the government made it seem like Assad’s work would get White House attention... yhoo.it/2o9z2Mh
Yet within two years of Trump’s entrance into the White House, Assad would find himself removed from his job, and his efforts to save money and recover hundreds of millions of dollars in potentially fraudulent spending tabled yhoo.it/2o9z2Mh
His treatment, he contends, was the direct result of his attempts to save the Pentagon money and identify potential contract fraud, which brought him into conflict with the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer yhoo.it/2o9z2Mh
It was a conflict that ended dramatically, he says, when shortly after he emailed senior Pentagon officials about potential fraud, details about his travel records and his demotion were published in the press yhoo.it/2o9z2Mh
Assad, who is now retired, says the issues he brought up involved potentially billions of dollars in waste and fraud, and still aren’t being addressed yhoo.it/2o9z2Mh
It’s a claim that’s backed up by multiple interviews conducted by Yahoo News with Assad and those who worked with him at the Pentagon, as well as by documents obtained through FOIA yhoo.it/2o9z2Mh
The Pentagon’s senior leadership, many of whom came directly from the senior leadership of defense companies, are only making the problem worse, Assad argues yhoo.it/2o9z2Mh
“There’s a lot of inappropriate pricing going on by major companies dealing with the Department of Defense, and there is an inherent conflict of interest when you have people coming in from industry,” he said yhoo.it/2o9z2Mh
While the Pentagon, in response to detailed questions, objected broadly to the notion of any ethics violations, it declined to comment on Assad or his specific allegations, other than to argue over the scale of the potential contract fraud yhoo.it/2o9z2Mh
Documents obtained by Yahoo News showed that the amount of overcharges identified to date by Pentagon auditors, who reviewed a relatively small sampling of contracts, is close to $900 million yhoo.it/2o9z2Mh
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