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Or choose from other holiday bestsellers. Up to 40% off at 1-800-flowers.com sxm. That's 1-800-flowers. Com sxm. Welcome to the Beat, everyone. I'm Ari Moore. Melba we have a lot coming up tonight, including some very interesting news by the end of the hour. But we begin with what is now a story that not only royals, the Trump administration, our Pentagon, the United States as we know it, but honestly, the whole world. Because while we often look at problems these days in America, and we've covered many of them, the fate of the so called war, or what some see as a pretense, a wannabe war waged by this Trump administration, perhaps illegally against other countries and the F of the Pentagon chief leading that effort. All of this concerns a lot of real people, real lives around the world. And that's where we begin with Trump Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who faces allegations of having committed or overseen a war crime. And against that backdrop, a new internal Pentagon report which is done by these watchdogs. You may remember Trump ousted many of them. You may remember the reports and the concerns from lawyers and nonpartisan legal experts about why you need those watchdogs in government, totally apart from whether you vote, voted for or like a given administration. Well, here's an example of a watchdog doing its work because while it appears that Mr. Hegseth did not participate or cooperate meaningfully, and we'll get to that, the watchdog at the Pentagon has found that nonetheless, based on the evidence they gathered, he put his employees, service members at risk. And that's in A scandal. You might remember the intelligence failures and mistakes committed by Hegseth and others in what they called signalgate for the name of the app they use. So this is the inspector general report. It centers around the messages sent from high ranking Trump national security officials that included the vice president, the CIA director, the then national security advisor, and others. At the time they were discussing US Strikes in Yemen. These messages were sent on this secret app, signal, which as a reminder is something that civilians and random people sometimes use for a layer of security. Although the government can tell you signal is not like magic. You can get a hold of signal chats, as these people ultimately found, and remember they have a lot more secure material available to them that apparently they just flouted and didn't use. Now, the initial mistake that teed this off was a journalist, the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, who was added to the chat. An unclassified version of the watchdog report is set to come out tomorrow, but we're already getting glimpses of it and it's going to Congress. There's a source of who has knowledge of the report and tells msnow that it found Hegseth put the operations and service people at risk with his signal mistake. Hegseth sent messages that included information about targets, weapons that the US Would be deploying, and attack sequencing, according to the information we initially already had from the Atlantic. Sources also say that Hegseth refused an interview request and would not turn over his phone. So you have this kind of watchdog investigation, and then you have, of course, powerful people who sometimes flout it. But again, for someone who was just using signal, willy nilly, the question is, if he would send these messages, including accidentally or not, to a reporter, why wouldn't he trust or cooperate with his own Pentagon team to get to the bottom of this? And by the way, people in government are humans. Humans make mistakes. If you make a mistake, that is, you don't try to leak information, you're not trying to hurt the troops, but you made a mistake and now you want to clean it up and hey, let's not do that again. Well, the usual proper course would be to cooperate confidentially with your own Pentagon investigation, address the problem, put together preventive measures, and move forward according to the reporting we have, and we'll update it as we get it. Hegseth did not do that, did not cooperate, and the report finds he violated department policy. That is, of course, the ongoing sort of Runway on a story that made big waves when it first happened so long ago. Then there is the very Recent story where the probes are just getting started of an alleged war crime that was conducted under Hagseth's leadership. Who might ultimately be held responsible for that is of course, a intricate military and legal question. A reminder, of course, the military is in our country governed by its own uniform code of Military Justice. There is a different legal system, if you saw a few good men that oversees that separate from, say, just the random federal courts that others deal in. And so there will be a real military legal investigation here if the process works. And then there is also Congress, which currently has calls from Democrats and Republicans to get to the bottom of this, to interview the necessary individuals. And some saying Hagseth has lost confidence and may ultimately have to leave this office. If you go over to conservative media, the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal says Hagseth must of course testify under oath about this, while the commanding officer, Admiral Mitch Brady, will be giving a classified briefing to lawmakers tomorrow. Hegseth has faced criticism for his odd public and at times, frankly, Orwellian messages that he's rushed to post about Bradley. You know, this is often a very content oriented social media type cabinet. And so he rushed onto social media platforms and X to post things that seem to pin the blame on this individual while also claiming to take some sort of higher ground.
