Clint Watts

Clint Watts is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Non-Resident Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, as well as a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. Clint examined the rise of social media influence by publishing his first book entitled Messing with The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News. Clint is the leader of Miburo, a strategic analysis and consulting company.

Clint’s research and writing focuses on extremism, counterterrorism, social media malign influence, misinformation and disinformation. Clint’s tracking of terrorist foreign fighters allowed him to predict the rise of the Islamic State over al Qaeda in 2014. Then, from 2014 to 2016, Clint worked with a team to track and model Russian influence operations via social media leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Russian interference efforts targeting that election. This research led Clint to testify before four different Senate committees in 2017 and 2018 regarding Russia’s information warfare campaign against the U.S. and the West. Leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Clint and his team researched foreign interference efforts targeting the election, domestic extremism, and COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation.

Clint’s writing has appeared in a range of publications to include the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, Politico, Lawfare, War On The Rocks and Huffington Post.

Before becoming a consultant and researcher, Clint served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, an FBI Special Agent, the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), a consultant to the FBI’s Counter Terrorism Division (CTD) and National Security Branch (NSB), and as an analyst supporting the U.S. Intelligence Community and U.S. Special Operations Command.