The following is a transcript of an interview with former MP Will Hurd that aired on Sunday, March 27, 2022 on “Face the Nation.”
JOHN DICKERSON: Will Hurd is with us now. He is a former Republican congressman from Texas, a former CIA officer and now the author of American Reboot. Congressman, welcome.
THE FORMER CONGRESSMAN WILL HURD US: It’s a pleasure to be there.
JOHN DICKERSON: The book starts with a very exciting moment, I won’t spoil it, but in your career in the CIA. So I want to use that intelligence to talk about intelligence. What does your intelligence background tell you about what is happening in Ukraine right now?
HURD: Well, right now he’s telling me something I learned during that almost decade as a undercover officer where he 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 be afraid of us. And when you use it as a metric to see what’s going on in Ukraine, our allies, President Zelensky, are asking us to do more. Our adversaries, our enemies. Vladimir Putin is launching cruise missiles in the western part of Ukraine because he is not afraid to respond. We need to keep doing more. And I think we can help prevent an incredible loss of life.
JOHN DICKERSON: Quickly making more sense what?
HURD: Look, I think we should give as many weapons as we can. What we don’t know in the previous segment you talked about, will 20 MiG be enough to do anything? Well, everyone underestimated the Ukrainians before that happened. Who knows what they might do with these tools? And we need to be prepared to help them avoid significant loss of life.
JOHN DICKERSON: And the other part of your experience that I want to take advantage of is cybernetics. Write about it in the book. President Biden told U.S. business leaders this week: Be careful, tighten your goals more than you’ve ever been. What could the Russians do?
HURD: Well, the Russians can do a lot of things. They could affect sewage treatment plants. We saw this in the United States last summer. They could try to affect our network. We saw the grid in my home state of Texas. You know, it was because, the grid went down or almost went down due to weather issues. But you can mimic this similar type of attack through a digital attack. And so the world is incredibly interconnected to increase things like artificial intelligence will be the future of cybersecurity, where you will have a bad and bad AI versus a good AI. And this is moving at a fairly significant speed.
JOHN DICKERSON: Why hasn’t the Russian cyberattack come as expected?
HURD: I don’t think the Russians are three meters tall. I think that’s one of the things we learn from this. They thought that this campaign and this, this invasion of Ukraine would go differently. The fact that the FSB, which is responsible for many of its cyber activities, is rounding up some of them and using them as scapegoats, says why the attacks are going so badly. So I think they’ve been consumed and they haven’t been able to get there.
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 parts of the electorate that have traditionally not been Republican. So with that in mind, as you look at Judge Jackson’s confirmation hearings this week, how do you think the Republican Party did with its representatives who questioned it about the larger purpose of your book?
HURD: Well, look, I think what’s crazy about here. This is a seminal moment, isn’t it? Yes. I do not agree with the judicial philosophy of the judge, but it is clear that she is qualified. And the fact that it is, I think, the second most popular justice ever nominated for a seat, that should be – that should be the story, just when it comes to it – when it comes to that. Of course, a handful of senators acted as jokers in his testimony. And they are asking questions similar to what other senators have asked in other Supreme Court judge nominations. But my point in the book is that the Republican Party needs to start looking like that in the United States because we have a real chance. Republicans will get the House back in 2022, and we will get it back mainly because of the incompetence of the Democratic Party. Imagine that instead of voting because voters think others are so bad they vote for us because they believe in our ideas. Let’s watch some of this happen in my home state of South Texas, where you’ll see Latinos vote for Republicans and probably record numbers.
JOHN DICKERSON: So I want to emphasize that theory. Your argument is essentially that the Republican Party needs to catch up with where America is going, a different constituency to the one they support. And you mean the Republican autopsy after the loss of 2012. Donald- And in that autopsy, they said Republicans should adopt a comprehensive immigration reform. Stop sending the message that we only care essentially about white voters. Donald Trump heard it and said, crazy. I’m going to run the other way around. And he won. And now, as you say, Republicans are ready to take over the House and Senate. It seems like a pretty strong argument against you. Are you sure?
HURD: Well, Donald Trump won-win, but then he lost too. He lost the House. He lost the Senate. Right. And so there was. And then and then if we look at 2020. Joe Biden won and he had absolutely no hurdle because the public said, uh, we don’t like some of that stuff that the Democratic Party will do. So yes, a good part of the Republican Party is still, you know, blindly loyal to President Trump. But it is not the majority. And this is the opportunity we have and this is where we need to be thinking about it in 2022, when the opportunities we have in order to grow and improve our electoral successes.
JOHN DICKERSON: There’s a question about Donald Trump’s power in the party. You say the first thing Republicans have to do is admit that the 2020 election was legitimately decided in favor of Joe Biden. This is not the majority position, according to opinion polls, among Republicans.
HURD: Sure. But when I cross the country now and in promoting the book American reboot one of the things I’ve seen people say: yes, let’s go, let’s go further, let’s move on. Joe Biden is the right of the president. Let’s start talking about the next one. So, bottom line is that we’re really looking forward to it. We are at a time when 72% of Americans believe the country is going the wrong way. And this is not new. This has been going on for a long time. And what I’m trying to say is that we don’t have to accept the current trajectory. There are different ways of doing things. And I try to take advantage of my time since 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. Thanks. And we’ll be back in a moment.
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