Welcome to the beat, everyone. I'm Ari Melbert. 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

roils 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 fate 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 Hegeseth,

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 voted for or like a given administration. Well, here's an example

of a watchdog doing its work, because while it appears

that Mr. Hegeseth 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 Hegset and others in what they called

Signalgate for the name of the app they used. So this is the Inspector General Report.

It centers around the messages sent from high-ranking Trump national security officials. That

included the

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