Secretary Wright Joins ABC News's This Week With George Stephanopoulos - July 19, 2026

Energy Secretary Chris Wright joins us now. Secretary Wright, thank you for being here. We saw U.S. forces struck Iran for the eighth night in a row last night. Is the president planning any further retaliation for the killing of those two U.S. service members? Yeah, look, the president's mission is essential for peace in the Middle East and peace in the world, and that is to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons and to degrade their ability to terrorize their neighbors and the world and global commerce. So yes, this mission will go on until the mission is done. But I'm asking you, does he plan retaliation for the killing of those U.S. service members? It's a tragic to lose American lives, but this is a mission that will save countless lives going forward. His focus is on degrading the Iranian ability to terrorize the world, to hold world commerce hostage as they are doing right now, and to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. That is unchanged. You were on the show back in March, and I want to play something of what you said about how long this war would last. I think that this conflict will certainly come to the end in the next few weeks. Could be sooner than that. So you said it would certainly come to an end within a few weeks. We are now nearly five months into this war. How does it end? When does it end? Well, the plan, we needed four to six weeks for military actions. They went for five and a half weeks. We did a pause to try to get an agreement with the Iranian people to allow oil to flow without them attacking it. They've proven unwilling to do that, and we've pivoted. Now what we're doing is assuring that that oil and gas and other products can flow through the Strait of Hormuz with or without Iranian cooperation. And we've continued to degrade their offensive military capabilities. The president is always looking for the diplomatic off-ramp. President Trump wants to end it with a peaceful agreement with Iran, but it takes two parties to do that. If they're ready to do that, that's the way it'll end. If not, we will continue to assure flow of traffic through the Strait without Iran's cooperation. But we're not seeing flow now, right? I mean, hasn't flow of traffic to the Strait of Hormuz effectively stopped over the past few days? Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I get the data on that every day. The seven-day trailing average right now is just under 7 million barrels a day flowing through the waterway and just under 7 million barrels a day additional flow through the bypass pipelines. So we're at a little under 14 million barrels a day from the Arabian Gulf region. That's two-thirds of pre-conflict traffic, dramatically up from where we were back in March when I was last on your show. Not 100% yet, but two-thirds of flow right now. And that's over the past few days? When's that average? What we saw, the numbers from Thursday were simply eight ships going through the Strait of Hormuz. That's far below. So almost all the public, almost all the public data I've seen is incorrect. There's flow through two routes through the Strait of Hormuz. There's up near the Iranian islands that's flow complicit with Iran, but that's not nothing. And then there's flow through the southern route that's protected by American infrastructure. And we count the volume of oil that goes through. The ship numbers are down more dramatically, but of course we're flowing larger tankers now to keep the world markets as well supplied as we can. Gasoline prices today are more than a dollar a gallon cheaper than they were four years ago under the Biden administration. And we'll do everything we can to drive them further down in the weeks and months ahead. And we've seen over the past week, the price of oil go up, the price of gas go up. The Iranian IRGC is now saying that if the U.S. strikes continue, they will go to what they are calling full scale assault and annihilation and try to smash infrastructure, specifically energy infrastructure in the region. What are they capable of doing and what are the implications for the price of oil and the price of gas? Well, clearly, as we've seen, decades of focusing their entire economy on armament has made a very prickly Iran. They've continued to attack their neighbors shamelessly, civilian targets, at least as much as military targets. We don't have any reason to believe they will stop that, but we are continuing to shrink their ability to execute those attacks. And we are doing this in coordination and in partnership with all of their neighbor countries that they are assaulting. OK, Mr. Richard, while I've got you here, a different topic. The president made it clear this week that he views election security as a top domestic priority. Yet, we saw his budget has cut CISA, the cybersecurity agency, by 700 million dollars. If he's so concerned about possible foreign interference in our elections, why does his budget cut the agency that would be charged with preventing that? Well, look, there's many cybersecurity agencies across the government. We meet regularly on that topic and our efforts have done nothing but ramp up. Sure, they've gotten more sophisticated and a different focus of them. But I wouldn't look at the inputs, the money spent. I'd look at the outputs, the quality of United States cybersecurity that's never been higher than where it is right now under President Trump. Never been higher. You're including election security in that. Across the board, we are looking at cybersecurity from threats from adversaries. I've not been involved in the election efforts, so I can't comment on them. But obviously, having trust in American systems of government and keeping our nation secure is top priority for the Trump administration. And one last question before you go, a really simple one. Did Joe Biden win the 2020 presidential election? He was president for four years. Clearly so. He clearly won the election. Look, I'm not an election evaluator, but it sure seems to me like he did. OK, Secretary Wright, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.