An ITN analysis finds a State Department employee with the same name as a person at the center of accusations of election hacking was one of only ten employees to graduate the National Defense University with an advanced cybersecurity degree.
A man by the name of Stefano Serafini is accused of being one of the individuals that facilitated the hacking of the presidential election on Nov. 3. That hack allegedly switched votes electronically from President Trump to Joe Biden and took place at – among other sites – the U.S. Embassy in Rome, Italy.
Those allegations, made by Maria Zack of Nations In Action, a government accountability group, also say Serafini, a 25-year veteran of the State Department, retired shortly before Election Day in order to protect his pension.
An individual named Stefano Serafini was read into the Congressional record in 1997 as having entered the foreign service at the U.S. State Department. That would have put that individual at the 23-year mark of service last year.
An individual with that same name also graduated from the elite National Defense University with a concentration in Cybersecurity Leadership in 2017. The discipline trains graduates in advanced cybersecurity functions such as risk analysis, security incident management, continuity of operations, and disaster recovery.
That record is of note as State Department employees are the minority of graduates from NDU. According to NDU’s website, its mission is to train “warfighters in critical thinking and the creative application of military power,” and as such traditionally attracts members of U.S. military branches as well as foreign militaries.
According to an ITN analysis out of 2,045 students to graduate NDU in the years 2017, 2018 and 2020, Serafini is one of only ten State Department employees to do so with the advanced cybersecurity degree…
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