To further discuss the Signal incident, I spoke earlier with Republican Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska.

He spent nearly three decades in the U.S. Air Force retiring as a Brigadier General.

Congressman, welcome back to the News Hour. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you very much. So have you seen many in the White House and many people who are on this

Signal group chat have denied that it included classified information.

We've seen the Atlantic has now published the text of those chats.

You specialized in intelligence in the Air Force.

Do you see classified info in these chats?

I think it's clearly classified, so they're digging themselves a bigger hole. They should just

be straightforward and honest, say we screwed up. Now, I want to say the operation itself, I praise

it. The Houthi's been shutting down, you know, the sea lines of communication. We had to open

it up. So I support that. I want to take away from that. But there's no doubt when you start saying two hours before an operation, we're going to launch these aircraft at this time or we're going to have bombs go off at this time. And you're talking about Yemen. That is classified. And so I would implore the Secretary of Defense and others. Just own it and say it was my fault. I screwed up and take responsibility.

I think they keep digging a deeper hole, and then when you do that, you lose credibility.

And I don't think that's good for America either.

So on why this information was shared in the first place, I mean, one expert we talked to said that even a junior officer would have known that this is classified information.

Should Pete Hegesath, Secretary of Defense Hegset, who did serve in the military, shouldn't he have known it was classified?

Yes. He should have known it. Absolutely. And I think everybody on that signals chat should have known that that was an inappropriate place to put launching data of our aircraft to timing, the impact times and all that.

The Secretary of Defense should have known that.

Now, I don't know.

I try to get people the benefit of the doubt.

I just imagine maybe he felt pressured or rushed.

I don't know.

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