Matt Castelli’s Long-Shot Race to Defeat Elise Stefanik

Motivated after Sept. 11 …

Raised in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., by a Republican mom and Democratic father, Castelli performed baseball in highschool, then went to Siena School, a personal Franciscan establishment close to Albany. He was impressed to get a grasp’s diploma in nationwide safety research at Georgetown College after Sept. 11, then joined the C.I.A., the place, he says, he “straddled” the company’s operational and analytical wings as a concentrating on specialist and, later, a pacesetter of assorted groups.

After spending 5 months in Barack Obama’s Nationwide Safety Council, he spent a yr as a director for counterterrorism in Donald Trump’s tumultuous Nationwide Safety Council, serving beneath Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then Gen. H.R. McMaster. Castelli then returned to the C.I.A. for about two years in a liaison function whereas attending enterprise faculty at Northwestern College on the facet, earlier than leaving for the personal sector.

Throughout his time in two administrations, Castelli additionally had a front-row seat to the rise of teams just like the Islamic State, which gave him a direct appreciation for the blowback America confronted within the Islamic world after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. After seven C.I.A. officers have been killed by a suicide bomber in 2009 at an American base in Khost, Afghanistan, Castelli took a extra “operational function,” he stated, declining to enter particulars.

… and once more after Jan. 6

But it surely was the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, Castelli says, that motivated him to depart his job at a well being care firm to run for public workplace.

Final yr, he moved upstate for the primary time and now lives in Glens Falls, an previous lumber-mill and paper-factory city close to Lake George, and introduced his run in opposition to Stefanik in September. That has fueled the accusation from Stefanik’s native political machine that Castelli is a carpetbagger — a transplant from Washington, D.C., or, worse, Poughkeepsie.

In Castelli’s telling, nonetheless, his resolution to run in opposition to Stefanik was impressed by her protection of Trump and embrace of his conspiracy theories in regards to the 2020 election — even after the assault on the Capitol — offended his sense of patriotism.