Cape Attorney, Republican Running For AG

BUZZARDS BAY, MA — Cape Cod attorney and National Guard veteran Jay McMahon will seek the Republican nomination for Massachusetts attorney general, his campaign said Tuesday.

McMahon, of Bourne, was the Republican nominee for Massachusetts attorney general in 2018 and has more than 35 years of legal, law enforcement and military experience. He's served as a trial attorney in every level of the Massachusetts court system, and also in federal court.

He lost in 2018 to Attorney General Maura Healey, but will run again to try to make the seat red in the open race, since Healey is running for governor.

"Maura Healey has used the office of the Massachusetts Attorney General for her extreme left wing 'woke' political agenda, but has ignored the plight of our first responders who are now being targeted and fired over unconstitutional vaccine mandates," McMahon said in a statement. "When the pandemic struck in early 2020, these First Responders, nurses, and healthcare workers were our heroes, putting themselves in harms way to help those victims of Covid-19. Now those same heroes of being treated as 'zeroes,' and are being fired by the government, with no response from Maura Healey."

McMahon also served in the Massachusetts Army National Guard and was a military police lieutenant in the 1970s. He was elected in 2020 to serve on the Massachusetts Republican State Committee, representing the Plymouth and Barnstable Senate District.

Married to his wife Shelley for 30 years, McMahon is a father of five, the eldest who died in 2008 amid the opioid epidemic, after sustaining injuries while serving in the U.S. Army during the Iraq War.

"Since the pandemic, COVID-19 deaths have grabbed the headlines. However, the Commonwealth is still suffering thousands of deaths each year due to opioid addiction," McMahon said in a statement. "I have a three-prong approach to deal with those matters. In Massachusetts, we have laws against selling illegal drugs in a school zone."

"Why isn’t every area on the streets treated as a school zone?" McMahon added. "Does this mean that everywhere else is a sanctuary for selling drugs? We need to dry up the source of drugs in Massachusetts. We need to make it brutally difficult for drug dealers and thugs to ply their trade in this state. And we need to give quality rehabilitative care to the opiate addict whereby they are actually healed from their addiction, and thus giving them their lives back."