Welcome to the News Hour. A Pentagon Watchdog report has found that Defense Secretary Pete

Hegeseth put U.S. service members at risk when he used the signal messaging app to discuss

a military strike in Yemen earlier this year. His use of signal came to light when a journalist

was accidentally added to a chat that gave sensitive real-time updates about a strike against Houthi militants.

Nick Schifrin is here to walk us through what we know.

So, Nick, what did the Pentagon watchdog find?

So this is an investigation by the Department of Defense's Inspector General mandated by Congress.

It took him months.

And according to a person who has read this document, the inspector general found that the

messages that the secretary transmitted were, quote, secret no foreign. The definition of that

classification level is that unauthorized disclosure could reasonably expected to cause serious damage

to national security, and it can't be shared with foreigners. And the inspector general went on to

say, if those messages had been intercepted,

it would have endangered U.S. service members and the mission.

And the reason the Inspector General has concluded this is that Hegset was, as you just said,

narrating or really previewing upcoming strikes in the Yemen against Houthi rebel leaders

on a signal chat, where Atlantic

Editor-in-Chief and Washington Week moderator Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally added.

And the detail was extraordinary.

Times, the types of weapons, exactly who was going to be flying toward Yemen exactly when.

And they concluded, quote, we are currently

clean on OPSEC short for operational security. A former senior military official told me this, Jeff,

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