"Face the Nation" transcript, June 3: Axelrod, Priebus and more

SENATOR KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: Well, Bob, first of all, I just have to say it is laughable that the Democrats would say, oh, we shouldn't be looking at Obama's record. Are you kidding? Of course, that's how you run elections. And historically, we've had negative campaigns. We don't argue about that. But is it right to distort a record of a private company like Bain Capital that--

BOB SHRUM: What's the distortion, Senator?

SENATOR KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: --did increase jobs.

BOB SHRUM: What's the distortion?

SENATOR KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: The distortion is that the steel industry was going under all over the country because of low cost competition globally. That-- and that ad that you ran that said that the Bain Capital took it over and then the jobs were gone, they kept it open for seven years trying to keep those jobs going and they couldn't compete like no other steel company in America could compete with the low-cost competition overseas.

BOB SHRUM: Yeah, but they got seven years--

SENATOR KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: Now that's the fact--

BOB SHRUM: --of giant fees--

SENATOR KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: --and it was a distortion.

BOB SHRUM: --which is what they wanted.

SENATOR KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: And if you're running against a capitalist company that created overall jobs, you are going to lose because we're looking at the Obama record and jobs-- we've got an 8.2 percent unemployment rate, and what do we see? We see the President talking about new taxes on the people who could create jobs.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Senator.

SENATOR KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: We see him stifling the jobs that could be created by not approving the Keystone Pipeline even though the Washington Post said he should do it.

BOB SCHIEFFER: All right.

SENATOR KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: I mean, really, it is his record here that will--

BOB SCHIEFFER: Ding, ding, ding.

SENATOR KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: --win the election.

BOB SCHIEFFER: There is a bell ringing here, Senator. I'm sorry.

SENATOR KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: Thank you.

BOB SCHIEFFER: We're just out of time. We'll be back. And thank you all so much for a very spirited discussion.

BOB SHRUM: Thank you.

BOB SCHIEFFER: We'll be back in one minute to talk about some presidential foreign policy decisions.

(ANNOUNCEMENTS)

BOB SCHIEFFER: We're back now with two very well-known reporters and their two brand new books. Our friend David Sanger of the New York Times, chief Washington correspondent, author of Confront and Conceal; and our friend Dan Klaidman, who writes for Newsweek and the Daily Beast and has written Kill or Capture.

David, I want to start with you. But before I do I want to clear up one thing, I-- I said earlier in the broadcast, when I'd asked David Axelrod that in these books it was reported that he was in one of these national security meetings. I believe you said it-- both of you say it was not in your books but it was actually in a New York Times story.

DAVID SANGER (Confront and Conceal/New York Times): That's right.

BOB SCHIEFFER: But that was not a story reported by you.

DAVID SANGER: That's right.

BOB SCHIEFFER: So--

DAVID SANGER: Mm-Hm.

BOB SCHIEFFER: --we-- we'll let that go. Let-- let me just ask you this you write in this book and you summarized in a piece in the New York Times this week, David. The story of this covert cyber attack that the United States and Israel used to do significant damage to Israel's-- I mean, to Iran's nuclear development program. It was code named Olympic Games. This was all news to me. Tell me about this.

DAVID SANGER: Well, it wasn't just a single attack, Bob. It was a four-yearlong campaign that continues through to this day. Olympic Games began under the Bush administration, was handed off from President Bush to President Obama in a meeting they had just a few days before the transfer of power in January of 2009. You know, Bob, the United States--

BOB SCHIEFFER: And what did-- you put a worm--

DAVID SANGER: Right.

BOB SCHIEFFER: --into their--

DAVID SANGER: The-- the way--

BOB SCHIEFFER: --computers.

DAVID SANGER: The way it worked, Bob, was that the U.S. and Israel jointly designed a system to get inside the computer controllers that run the Natanz enrichment plant, this is where-- where Iran makes its nuclear fuel. For a year they sent in a beacon that just mapped out, put up a blueprint of what this plant looks like, and then they sent in a series of these worms that were designed to speed up or slow down the centrifuges in ways where the Iranians didn't realize that they were even under attack. They believed that their-- their equipment was simply failing.

This went on many times until they made a mistake. And the worm got out of Natanz through the laptop of an unwitting Iranian engineer who went home, plugged into the internet, and suddenly one variant of this worm was out for the world to see. And that was the thread I started to pull on to be able to tell the story as we do in Confront and Conceal--

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, how significant was the damage?