369 Christine Romans and Clint Watts

Christine Romans is CNN's Chief Business Correspondent and anchor of Early Start with Laura Jarrett weekdays from 4 am to 6 am ET. She won an Emmy award for her work on the series "Exporting America" about globalization and outsourcing American jobs overseas, and is author of three books: Smart is the New Rich: If You Can't Afford it—Put it Down (Wiley 2010) How to Speak Money (Wiley 2012) and Smart is the New Rich Money Guide for Millennials (Wiley March 2015).

Romans is known as CNN's explainer-in-chief of all things money. She covers business and finance from the perspective of American workers and small business owners, translating what budgets and bailouts and economic data mean for families. Romans brings an award-winning career in business reporting. In 2014, she crossed the country reporting for her series, "Is College Worth it." In 2010, Romans co-hosted "Madoff: Secrets of a Scandal," a special hour-long investigative report examining disgraced financier Bernard Madoff and how he perpetrated one of the largest investor frauds ever committed by an individual. In 2009, her special "In God We Trust: Faith & Money in America" explored the intersection of how our religious values govern the way we think about and spend our money. Her series of reports "Living Dangerously" illustrated the risks and precautions for the nearly 30 percent of America's population living in the path of an Atlantic-coast hurricane. In "Deadly Hospitals," she examined how hospitals spread dangerous infections and what patients can do to protect themselves.

Romans joined CNN Business News in 1999, spending several years reporting from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Romans was the anchor of CNNfn's Street Sweep tracking the market's boom through the late 1990s to tragedy of Sept. 11 attacks. She anchored the first democratic elections in Iraq's history from CNN Center in Atlanta. She has covered four hurricanes and four presidential elections, and was part of the coverage teams that earned CNN a George Foster Peabody award for its Hurricane Katrina coverage and an Alfred I. duPont Award for its coverage of the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia. The National Foundation for Women Legislators has honored her with its media excellence award for business reporting and the Greenlee School of Journalism named her the 2009 James W. Schwartz award recipient.

Clint Watts is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Non-Resident Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. He is also a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. He recently 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.

His research and writing focuses on terrorism, counterterrorism, social media influence and Russian disinformation. Clint’s tracking of terrorist foreign fighters allowed him to predict the rise of the Islamic State over al Qaeda in 2014. From 2014 – 2016, Clint worked with a team to track and model the rise of Russian influence operations via social media leading up to the U.S. Presidential election of 2016. 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.

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 the Huffington Post.

Before becoming a consultant, Clint served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, a FBI Special Agent, as the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), as 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.

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