Former Federal Agent Tells MSNBC FBI Deluged with 40,000 Tips After Capitol Assault: ‘Most Stressful Time’ for Agency Since 9/11

Former federal agent and MSNBC national security analyst Clint Watts said the FBI has been deluged by more than 40,000 tips since the pro-Trump Capitol insurrection last week and is now under the most stress since the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Speaking with Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace, Watts explained that the U.S. Capitol Police’s gross negligence was due to a institutional blind spot that ignored the threat from the president’s MAGA supporters.

“Clint, can you make some sense of all of this?” Wallace asked. “You don’t have to figure out to get onto Parler to find out what they were planning, they were talking it about it all over television.  Michael Flynn did an event, Rudy Giuliani did an event, the whole fam and all their girlfriends were at a rally that was televised. This was broadcast all day long and many days before it. It’s not what did they miss, it’s why did they miss it?”

“I think it comes down to just one thing, and it’s because the president was involved,” Watts said. “It was about optics. Had it been any other situation, imagine a Black Lives Matter protest, imagine any sort of march on D.C., you would have seen a more sizable presence there.”

“You tell immediately from the size of that crowd, when I think were estimated around 8,000 people, there were not near enough law enforcement to deal with that,” he added. “I think it was Saturday, Sunday before this was going on, my teams that do a lot of social media tracking, we were like this is going to be a huge deal. We devoted more resources from our own monitoring, and our analytical teams to this, because it was so obvious this was going to be a major scene.”

Wallace then followed up to ask what the FBI doing both to track down the dozens, if not hundreds , of people filmed and photographed rioting inside the Capitol on Wednesday — and to prevent any such assault in the days leading up to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next Wednesday.

Watt said it is likely “mayhem” inside federal law enforcement agencies trying to deal with the overwhelming amount of data and social media posts about the attack.

“I think I saw a numuber like 40,000 different tips being reported in. I cannot imagine an incident of this scale… this many suspects on such a large nationwide sort of manhunt at any given time,” Watts explained. “They have to clean up and investigate the mess that’s occurred around this tragedy last Wednesday, and they have to prepare for another mobilization potentially going on against the inauguration, and we have 50 states saying now that all may have different variants of this on Inauguration Day. They’re just waiting to get acquainted to one group or another. It’s probably the most stressful time for the FBI since 9/11.”

“It takes your breath away,” Wallace concluded.

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.