(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) The new lawyer for a Massachusetts lawfare victim revealed he had spent the past two and a half years in a Michigan jail for exercising his First Amendment right to criticize a public official.
Things are happening in the "justice system" in this country today that remind of the horrors we always heard about in "other countries".
A Massachusetts man was arrested and extradited to Michigan for sending critical emails – but not threats – to a Michigan politician. He's…
— Jared Wise (@TheWiseJared) May 9, 2026
Marc Aisen was extradited in December 2023 and has been awaiting trial since then on charges that he sent harassed a Bloomfield Township official with accusatory emails between July and October 2023.
As a result of his being denied due process, Aisen, who was 47 at the time of his arrest, “lost his job, was evicted from his apartment, and lost every worldly possession he owned,” wrote lawyer Jonathan Gross in a piece for the Gateway Pundit.
Gross, also a rabbi, recently took over Aisen’s legal representation alongside the Jewish Community Advocacy Council and Pacific Justice Institute. He previously served as senior counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights during the Trump administration and represented Jan. 6 defendants.
In many ways, the case against Aisen echoes the malicious J6 prosecutions, in which defendants frequently were overcharged and forced, in some instances, to wait exceedingly long for their trials, a violation of the Sixth Amendment.
It further violates a Michigan law that limits pretrial detention to 180 days, Gross said.
The case also has echoes of the notorious Michigan “fednapping” case, in which federal agents were accused of entrapping several unwitting militia members in a bungled plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
“Most Americans don’t believe the system can be weaponized against ordinary citizens. Judges and prosecutors are given the presumption of innocence and good faith, while criminal defendants are given the presumption of guilt,” Gross wrote about Aisen’s miscarriage of justice.
Ironically, with Aisen having only recently changed counsel after dropping his public defenders, the judge in the case is now eager to push forward with the proceedings, which were due to start on Monday with little prep time for the defense.
The ordeal started when Aisen sent an email accusing Bloomfield Treasurer Michael Schostak of having “covered up child sexual exploitation in [a] Jewish nonprofit.” He sent the email to 56 addresses, including 23 official local government emails, 14 officials from community boards and homeowners associations, and 19 private individuals, Gross said.
The allegations against Schostak stemmed from his alleged work at Secure Communities Network in support of transgender “genital mutilation” experiments on young children.
The sex-change operations were designed “to make them more sexually appealing to the gay predators,” Aisen alleged.
He further claimed that, despite occurring under the auspices of a Jewish nonprofit that advertised on the website JewishBoston.com, the procedures were an affront to the Jewish religion.
“Faggotry is against the Jewish religion and this is precisely why,” Aisen wrote.
After receiving no satisfactory reply from Schostak, other than a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action, Aisen proceeded to escalate the matter by emailing more people to draw attention to the response.
Harsh though it may have been — and perhaps actionable as a civil defamation case (if Schostak were able to establish falsity of the statements and meet other criteria) — Gross noted that the criminal charges against Aisen were baseless since he never made any threats of violence against his target.
But records reveal that Schostak was communicating in private with Bloomfield Township Police Chief James Gallagher to shut down the accusations by any means necessary.
“Another email this morning. What are my options here?” he wrote to Gallagher, who was not contracted to provide legal counsel to Schostak or other public officials.
Following his extradition halfway across the country, Gross sad that the prosecution against Aisen came “straight out of a Soviet playbook.”
He was charged with “Unlawful Posting of a Message,” a felony that carries up two years in prison for messages that may leave the targeted recipient feeling “terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested.”
Yet, Gross said the second charge was even more egregious. Aisen faces four additional years on the charge of “Using a Computer to Commit a Crime.”
Even if the jury were to find Aisen not guilty on the predicating charge, should the jury agree that there was no basis for Schostak to feel terrorized, he could still be convicted of this count.
Gross said the prosecution against Aisen presented a slippery slope that could empower Michigan’s corrupt leftist officials to terrorize individuals anywhere in the country over speech to which they objected.
“Under this law, a random X user in Oklahoma who tags Governor Gretchen Whitmer in a text that makes her feel frightened can be arrested at their home and dragged to Michigan to face felony charges,” he wrote.
Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
