After graduating from
Dunedin High School in 1997, DeSantis attended
Yale University. He was captain of
Yale's varsity baseball team and joined the
Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity.
[8][9] On the Yale baseball team, DeSantis was an outfielder; as a senior in 2001, he had the team's best
batting average at .336.
He graduated from Yale in 2001 with a
B.A. magna cum laude in
history. He then spent a year as a history teacher at the
Darlington School. DeSantis then attended
Harvard Law School, graduating in 2005 with a
Juris Doctor cum laude.
DeSantis received his
Reserve Naval officer's commission and assignment to the
Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG) in 2004 at the U.S. Naval Reserve Center in
Dallas, Texas, while still a student at Harvard Law School. He completed
Naval Justice School in 2005. Later that year, he received orders to the JAG Trial Service Office Command South East at
Naval Station Mayport, Florida, as a prosecutor. In 2006, he was promoted from
lieutenant, junior grade to
lieutenant. He worked for the
commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), working directly with detainees at the
Guantanamo Bay Joint Detention Facility.
In 2007, DeSantis reported to the
Naval Special Warfare Command Group in
Coronado, California, where he was assigned to
SEAL Team One and deployed to
Iraq with the
troop surge as the Legal Advisor to the SEAL Commander, Special Operations Task Force-West in
Fallujah.
DeSantis returned to the U.S. in April 2008, at which time he was reassigned to the Naval Region Southeast Legal Service. The
U.S. Department of Justice appointed him to serve as an
Assistant U.S. Attorney at the
U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida. DeSantis was assigned as a trial defense counsel until his honorable discharge from active duty in February 2010. He concurrently accepted a reserve commission as a lieutenant in the
Judge Advocate General's Corps of the
US Navy Reserve. He was awarded the
Bronze Star Medal, the
Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, the
Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and the
Iraq Campaign Medal.
