NEW YORK – A Brooklyn U.S. history teacher was detained for several hours while he was grilled by the secret service for making a vaguely threatening comment about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in a bar.

“The offending joke, I believe, was, ‘If Donald Trump becomes president, I would pursue an early retirement – life in federal prison.’ Lucky for me I know the two parts of the country a President Trump would spend most of his time in: the Beltway and the City,’” teacher Greg Chang, 28, recalled of his conversation with a friend at the Roebling Sporting Club on North 8th Street last Saturday.

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Chang, 28, told the Gothamist he was chatting with a friend at the bar around 5 p.m. when the incident occurred and someone at the establishment overheard his comments and an officer and a sergeant were on the scene within minutes. .

“The cops showed up, they actually physically came into the bar and asked me to step outside,” he said. “I stepped outside, and literally the first question out of the sergeant’s mouth is, ‘Did you make any comments about Donald Trump today?’”

Chang contends the police took his driver’s license and forced him to come to the 94th Precinct, where he was detained for three hours before he was interviewed. The police lost his driver’s license and insisted he sign waivers to allow them to comb his medical records and speak with his therapist, he said.

“After about three hours of waiting, two gentlemen walk in. One is a Secret Service agent, the other is a detective,” Chang told Gothamist. “I told them the joke. They questioned me for another hour.”

“They’re really pushing it, like, ‘Could you have possibly said anything else anyone thought was dangerous enough to call 911?'” Chang said.

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The teacher told the Gothamist he was finally released at 10 p.m. Saturday with a paper license and a lecture by the sergeant to consider the experience a lesson.

“At that point I lost my temper,” Chang said. “What is the lesson I’m supposed to take away here? That it’s normal for the NYPD to hold someone, not arrest someone, for hours on end without an explanation? A reminder that the NYPD is famous for losing evidence? Is the lesson that I’m not allowed to talk politics or make jokes in public?”

He also went on a profanity-laced tirade about the ordeal.

“At the end of the day this was a waste of everyone’s f**king time. My time, the police, Secret Service, because of a hearsay accusation that has no basis in anything, really,” Chang said. “I’m most pissed off that they lost my f**king license. I have to lose another Saturday to go to the DMV to get that figured out.”

Vice.com crime editor Matt Taylor contacted a First Amendment expert to weigh in Chang’s treatment.

According to the site:

Chang has not been charged with a crime, but can you get in real trouble for saying that you’d like to Kennedy your least favorite candidate? According to Clay Calvert, director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida, the answer is hell no.

“It was absurd to detain this particular individual for making what clearly appears to be a joke,” Calvert told me.

For something you say to be a “true threat”—basically, the legal standard for what counts as a legitimate one and not just loose talk—it has to be evaluated on three criteria: the content, the context, and the audience that heard it. “So you have to actually look at what was said, the context in which it was said—in this case in a bar as a joke—and the reaction to it, if people laughed and thought it was funny,” Clay said. “The [true threat] test really also requires that the person [in this case Trump] be put in fear of imminent bodily harm” in order not to be protected under the First Amendment, he added.