The following is a transcript of an interview with former Rep. Will Hurd that aired Sunday, March 27, 2022, on “Face the Nation.”
JOHN DICKERSON: We’re joined now by Will Hurd. He’s a former Republican congressman from Texas, a former CIA officer, and now the author of American Reboot. Congressman, welcome.
FORMER U.S. CONGRESSMAN WILL HURD: It’s a pleasure to be on.
JOHN DICKERSON: The book begins with a very exciting, I won’t spoil it, but moment in your CIA career. So I want to use that intelligence to talk about intelligence. What does your intelligence background tell you about what’s happening in Ukraine right now?
HURD: Well, right now it tells me that something I learned in those almost decade as an undercover officer where I was responsible for recruiting spies and stealing secrets. And when it comes to our foreign policy, we want our friends to love us and our adversaries to fear us. And when you use that as a metric on looking at what’s happening in Ukraine, our allies, President Zelensky, is asking us to do more. Our adversaries, our enemies. Vladimir Putin is launching cruise missiles into the western part of the Ukraine because he’s not afraid that we’re going to respond. We need to be doing more. And I think that we can help prevent an incredible loss of life.
JOHN DICKERSON: Quickly doing more meaning what?
HURD: Look, I think we should be giving about as much weaponry as we can. What we don’t know in the earlier segment you talked about, is 20 MiGs going to be enough to do anything? Well, everybody underestimated the Ukrainians before this happened. Who knows what they’re going to be able to do with those kinds of tools? And we have to be prepared to help them prevent significant loss of life.
JOHN DICKERSON: And the other piece of your expertise I want to tap is cyber. You write about it in the book. President Biden this week said to American business leaders, be careful, harden your targets more than you already have been. What could the Russians do?
HURD: Well, the Russians can do a lot of things. They could impact the water treatment plants. We’ve already seen that happen in the United States last summer. They could try to impact our grid. We saw in my home state of Texas the grid. You know, it was because- the grid went down or almost went down because of- because of weather issues. But you can mimic that similar kinds of attack through a- through a digital attack. And so the world is incredibly interconnected in increasing things like artificial intelligence is going to be the future of cybersecurity, where you’re going to have bad, bad A.I. versus good A.I.. And this is moving at a rather significant speed.
JOHN DICKERSON: Why hasn’t the Russian cyberattack happened the way people expect it?
HURD: I think the Russians are not ten feet tall. I think that’s one of the things that we learn from this. They’ve- they thought that this campaign and this- this- this invasion of Ukraine would be going differently. The fact that the FSB, which is responsible for a lot of their cyber activities, they’re rounding some of them up and using them as scapegoats, says as why the- the attacks are going so poorly. So I think they’ve been consumed and they haven’t been able to get to it.
JOHN DICKERSON: All right. Let’s turn the wheel now and talk about your book. One of the arguments you make in your book is that the Republican Party needs to reach out to those portions of the electorate that haven’t traditionally been Republicans. So with that in mind, as you watch the confirmation hearings of Judge Jackson this week, how do you think the Republican Party fared with its representatives questioning her towards the larger purpose of your book?
HURD: Well, look, I think what’s what’s what’s what’s crazy here. This is a seminal moment, right? Yes. I disagree with the judge’s judicial philosophy, but she’s obviously qualified. And the fact that she’s, I think, the second most popular justice ever nominated to the bench, that should be- that should be the story, right when it comes- when it comes to this. Of course, a handful of senators acted like jokers in their- in their in their testimony. And they’re asking questions similar to other senators have done in-in other nominations for Supreme Court justices. But my point in the book is that the Republican Party needs to start looking like America because we have a real opportunity. The Republicans are going to take back the House in 2022, and we’re primarily to take back the House because of the incompetence of the Democratic Party. Imagine that instead of voting because voters think the other guys are so bad that they’re voting for us because they believe in our ideas. We’re going to see some of that happen in my home state in south Texas, where you’re going to see Latinos vote for Republicans and probably record numbers.
JOHN DICKERSON: So I want to press on that theory. Your argument is essentially the Republican Party has to catch up with where America is going, a constituency different than the one that they support. And you refer back to the Republican autopsy after the 2012 loss. Donald- And in that autopsy, they said Republicans have to embrace comprehensive immigration reform. Stop sending the message that we only care essentially about white voters. Donald Trump heard that and said, nuts. I’m going to run the opposite. And he won. And now, as you say, Republicans are ready to perhaps take over the House and the Senate. That seems like a pretty strong argument against essentially you’re. Are you sure?
HURD: Well well, Donald Trump did won-win, but then he also lost. He lost the House. He lost the Senate. Right. And so there was- there was- there was. And then and then if we look in 2020. Joe Biden won and he had absolutely no coattails because the public said, hey, we don’t like some of these things the Democratic Party is going to. So, yes, a good chunk of the Republican Party is still, you know, blindly loyal to President Trump. But it’s not the supermajority. And this is the opportunity that we have and this is where we need to be thinking about this in in 2022, when the opportunities that we have in order- in order to grow and improve our electoral successes.
JOHN DICKERSON: There is a question about the power that Donald Trump has in the party. You say the first thing that Republicans have to do is admit that the 2020 election was legitimately decided in favor of Joe Biden. That’s not the majority position, according to polls, among Republicans.
HURD: Sure. But when I criss-cross the- the- the country now and in promoting the book American reboot one of the things that I’ve watched people say, yeah, let’s get- let’s get beyond that let’s-let’s move on. Joe Biden is the president’s right. Let’s start talking about the next thing. So, so, so for me, look, I’m talking about where we should be going. We are at a moment where 72% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. And this is not new. This has been going on for some time. And what I’m trying to say is we don’t have to accept the current trajectory. There’s different ways of doing things. And I try to use my time from when I was in the CIA, in business and in Congress to outline a different strategy.
JOHN DICKERSON: All right. Congressman Hurd, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. And we’ll be back in a moment.
