GOP Senate candidate John Deaton calls Warren part of 'broken system'

John Deaton said he wants "to retire" U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and bring a nonpartisan approach to Washington.

Speaking on WBUR's Radio Boston, the Republican candidate for Senate said his party affiliation won't drive his decision-making should he be elected.

"I'm going to have one test: Is it good for Massachusetts and America? If it is, I'm all in. If it not, I won't," he said.

Deaton, an attorney and retired Marine who moved to Massachusetts from Rhode Island last year, defeated Quincy City Councilor Ian Cain and industrial engineer Robert Antonellis in the GOP Senate primary. He now squares off against incumbent Warren in the general election.

"She has a loyalty to the Democratic party and an agenda. I don't," he said. "I believe in term limits. Give me 12 years — two terms — to go in there and do what I can to improve the lives of working people and poor people, and then I'm gonna go home," Deaton said. Warren is currently running for her third term.

Deaton spoke at length about cryptocurrency, pushing back on the idea that he's a "crypto candidate," and rebuffed Warren's contention that he was backed by cryptocurrency billionaires. He said he had nothing to do with a super PAC funded by cryptocurrency advocates that supports his candidacy.

"She's the crypto candidate," Deaton said, pointing to Warren's reelection announcement, which focused in part on cryptocurrency regulation. "I'm focusing on illegal immigration, debt, inflation, opioid addiction, foreign wars, the American dream. She's out there focusing on crypto."

He claimed crypto is not widely used for "illicit" activity because transactions are discoverable on the blockchain, which is public but uses alphanumeric keys instead of a person's identity.

"What I'm saying is Hamas actually issued a directive not to use crypto because it was too traceable," he said. "The NSA, the FBI, the CIA, have all come out and said they hope that criminals use Bitcoin. It's an open, distributed ledger. You can trace every single transaction."

On student debt reduction, Deaton criticized Warren on student loan forgiveness, saying the plans come at the expense of the poor, and "a plumber shouldn't have to pay for a Harvard MBA."

"All it is is trying to appease people, trying to buy votes," he said. "We need to give people, real people, an opportunity."

On immigration, Deaton said he wants to secure the border while expanding legal immigration and require asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until their court dates.

"This issue is crushing and bankrupting this state," he said.

Editor’s note: In the interview, Senate candidate John Deaton said “the government spent almost 8 billion dollars, federal government, to build 7 EV charging stations." According to reporting from March, seven EV stations were built in the two years following a $7.5 billion allocation from congress to build 500,000 EV stations. While it signals a slow start to the project, it does not directly translate to a $7.5 billion price tag for only seven stations. The federal project was intended to roll out over several years. Our fact-checking during the live segment did not reflect the full context of the issue. We regret the error.