Today on the Playbook podcast, it's a huge day for Pete Hegsteth, as the two biggest

crises of his year, and that's a high bar, are coming to a head in Congress.

Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, is juggling an increasingly unhappy group of Republicans

as the arou over affordability means they might lose the house next year.

We've got new polling on that.

And RFK Junior's vaccine panel meets to discuss further powering back the child immunization program.

Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard.

And I'm Dasha Burns.

It is Thursday, December 4th.

It's good to see you, Dasha. How are you?

I'm hanging in.

Well, you and Pete Houseth both, because the Defense Secretary has got a big day ahead of him.

For those that aren't following this closely, there are not one but two big crises on his

doorstep coming to a head. First of all, we're getting the Inspector General's report on the Signalgate fiasco from

earlier this year.

That's the official independent report on, quite frankly, one of the most outrageous and

incredible and jaw-dropping fiascos.

I can remember seeing coming out of the government in recent times.

Straight out of a house of cards or scandal or the West Wing wouldn't even think this up. This is not an Aaron Sorkan narrative. No one would have run that story. Shonda Rhines would have thought of it. Pure farce. We're getting the ID report on that. And at the same time, two of the top military officials in the country, General Dan Cain and Admiral Bradley are going to brief members of Congress about the boat strike that we've all been talking about for the past week or so in the Caribbean and exactly what happened with that second missile that took out the survivors of the boat.

Both of those things absolutely have Pete Hexeth at the center of them and his future.

We've already gotten a bit of a preview of what we might get in this report today from reporting out from a bunch of different outlets over the course of the last 24 hours, right? Yeah, correct, because it's done the rounds already. Hexeth got it. We think on Tuesday, lots of other officials in the Department of Defense have seen it, and that means that the very well-connected Pentagon reporters, who no longer work in the Pentagon, but still do their jobs really well,

have all figured out what's in it already. Pete Hagezeth is going to be slapped on the wrist,

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