All lawyers tend to voice similar dedication, but Bondy has taken the sentiment to a new level. Hours earlier, Bondy had posted a video on his Twitter account—overlaid with Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September”—showing Second Lady Karen Pence holding Parnas’ hand and patting him on the back with the vice president standing in the background.

It’s not exactly Perry Mason. But Bondy, who says he looks at all of his cases like a chess board, is focusing on the endgame—in this case, the sentencing judge, who he hopes will take into consideration Parnas’ willingness to cooperate with Congress.

“I usually think very early on about how to create or identify the brightest favorable light that I can find in a client,” Bondy says. “And with Lev, the brightest light, the most favorable light, is his truth.”

Bondy’s tweets at this point are mostly just photos of Parnas with various Trump allies—including members of his legal team, Pam Bondi and Jay Sekulow—who have either claimed not to know Parnas or declined to call for witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial. The goal is not just to expose hypocrisy, but also to “raise the stakes,” Bondy says, for the GOP’s defense of the president. And he wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t what Parnas wanted, he says.

“Here’s a nice shot of the latest @GOP senator/juror—Mike Braun of Indiana—afraid to call Lev Parnas as a witness at the impeachment trial, posing with, of course, Lev Parnas and @RudyGiuliani,” Bondy tweeted on Tuesday. “#LevRemembers #LevSpeaks #LevIsEverywhere #TheyAllKnew.”

In a way, Bondy is using Trump’s M.O. against him, appealing to the masses on Twitter with hashtags like “#LetParnasTestify,” “#CallLevNow,” “#LevIsKey,” and “#LetLevSpeak” as he tries to get the Senate to call Parnas as a witness in Trump’s impeachment trial. He’s mostly given up trying to appeal to federal prosecutors in New York, who are weighing bringing more charges against his client, by dangling bigger fish.

After all, Bondy notes, what’s the point of giving the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York information about Trump if the Justice Department has a policy against indicting a sitting president?

“Lev Parnas has first-hand information about the Ukranian quid pro quo,” Bondy tweeted last week. “And, @TheJusticeDept relies on cooperating witnesses every day in securing indictments & convictions. What does @GOP fear? Call the witnesses. #LevRemembers #LetLevSpeak.”

Parnas, for his part, has been speaking in recent days—but not to the Senate, which will vote again next week on whether to hear witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial. Instead, Parnas granted a riveting interview to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that became the show’s highest-rated of all time, and later fielded questions from Anderson Cooper on CNN.

To Cooper, Parnas hinted that he’s blessed Bondy’s social media strategy. “Every time he says that,” Parnais said—referring to Trump’s claims that he never knew Parnas— “I’ll show him another picture.”

The appearances came after House Democrats released a trove of potentially damning documents Parnas handed over, pursuant to a subpoena, showing the possible surveillance of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch; Ukraine’s former prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, dangling dirt on Biden in exchange for Yovanovitch’s firing; and photos of Parnas with members of Trump’s family and his administration — including Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Sorting out all of the various claims Parnas has made is a full-time employment program for investigative reporters. One of his most explosive claims to date is that Attorney General Bill Barr was “basically on the team” trying to get dirt on Biden, and that he often heard Giuliani and Toensing speaking to Barr about the scheme on the phone. But he hasn’t yet produced evidence that Barr was involved, and the Justice Department previously denied it.

What we do know for sure is this much: Parnas and his associate, Igor Fruman, were used as intermediaries by Giuliani as Trump’s personal attorney sought dirt on Joe Biden, the president’s chief 2020 opponent. The two men also paid Giuliani $500,000 in 2018—supposedly for business and legal advice, according to Reuters—around the time the trio began poking around on Biden in Ukraine. Fruman has chosen to stay the course—he remains in a joint defense agreement with Giuliani and has been silent since his indictment nearly four months ago.

But Parnas has gone 180 degrees in the opposite direction, turning on Trump and Giuliani and insisting that “everyone knew” about the scheme to pressure Ukraine into announcing an investigation of the Bidens. His words echo U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland’s November testimony about the Ukraine scheme: “Everyone was in the loop.”

To many outside legal commentators, Bondy’s strategy has been puzzling. Ken White, a criminal defense attorney, posited a number of theories earlier this month, including that this may be Bondy and Parnas’ way of offering a “public proffer” that can't be buried by the Barr-controlled Justice Department.

That’s part of it, Bondy acknowledges. “We’ve decided to speak to the audience that will listen to us,” Bondy said, referring both to Congress and to the public.

“We just need to be truthful and complete, while trying to raise awareness for the need for there to be a fair tribunal” in the Senate, he elaborated. “If we reach the point where Lev has not been called as a witness, at least I can look back and know I did the best I could for him and for the public.”

And those cheesy slideshows of Parnas with various Trump world luminaries? The ones whom Bondy often gleefully pumps out immediately after they say they don’t recall meeting him? They’re part of a strategy Bondy has been honing for decades, dating back to his days as a young lawyer who made his name representing high-profile New York mobsters.

The narrative goes something like this: Parnas was just one small part of a scheme directed from the top. And anything he did, he did with the naive belief that he was doing the right thing, because he trusted his superiors and always carried out their orders.

It doesn’t always work. But to Bondy, it’s always worth a try.

“The notion of all of a sudden being silent and relenting, while trying to be an advocate for a human being I’m trying to save—that is not in my book of conduct,” he said. “We’ve turned Lev around from being someone ridiculed on ‘Saturday Night Live’ to being potentially the best witness so far. And that was hard work—not magic.”



***

Bondy’s highest-profile clients in the past have been convicted mobsters like Peter Gotti, the older brother of Gambino crime family boss John Gotti, and Louis Eppolito, a New York cop who was sentenced to life in prison for murdering several people for the Lucchese crime family. (He bonded with Eppolito in particular over their mutual love of reptiles and their respective snake collections, Bondy told The New York Times for a profile in 2006.)

The 52-year-old father of three studied psychology at Columbia and applied to Brooklyn Law School only to get his mom off his case, he says. When she first suggested he apply to law school, he retorted: “Fine, I’ll become a lawyer for the Mafia,” he recalls, hoping it would deter her. It had the opposite effect: She encouraged him to apply to Brooklyn, “where all the best mob lawyers went,” he recalls her saying.

He jokes about it now, but Bondy insists he’s no mob lawyer.

“I’ve represented about 1,000 people and maybe 5 were made men in the Mafia,” Bondy said. “That’s not really how I define myself.”

He met his future wife on the first day of classes—she is a media attorney who most recently worked for HBO—and still remembers the constitutional law class he took with the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia while studying abroad at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

In college, he interned at the New York State Office of the Attorney General's Environmental Protection Bureau and Federal Defenders in Eastern District of New York—an “eye-opening” experience that exposed him to the “despair” of people who can’t afford lawyers, he says.

“We all have so many beautiful things about us in our lives,” Bondy says. “And the good transcends the bad. We’ve all transgressed. We’ve all made mistakes.”

Bondy’s next project wasn’t exactly for an underdog. After graduating, he began working with defense lawyers for one of the Colombian Medellin cartel’s top “sicarios,” or assassins—Dandeny Munoz Mosquera, better known as “La Quica,” who was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms in 1995 for his role in the 1989 bombing of an Avianca jetliner that killed all 107 people aboard, including two Americans.

Bondy ended up making several trips to Colombia, he recalls, and met with Colombian Attorney General Gustavo De Greiff to collect evidence. De Greiff confirmed his meetings with Bondy in a letter to the judge in the case that was obtained at the time by Colombian outlet El Tiempo.

The narrative Bondy is now pushing of Parnas as merely a bagman for Giuliani and Trump is reminiscent of an argument he used with Gotti more than a decade ago. “My client was considered a dope by his own brother!” Bondy said in his opening statement at Gotti’s trial.

While Bondy has never disparaged Parnas, he’s pushed hard to portray him as more messenger than mastermind. “Lev Parnas was directly present in Ukraine, working on behalf of @POTUS, and at the direction of @RudyGiuliani,” Bondy tweeted in December.

The strategy of taking Parnas’ legal fight into the court of public opinion is either “brilliant” or “desperate,” depending on which lawyer you speak to. Most agree it is risky—prosecutors have already asked for Parnas’ bail to be revoked over his alleged concealment of a $1 million payment from a Ukrainian oligarch, and Parnas’ disclosures to Congress or on prime-time television could incriminate him further.

But Bondy seems intent upon appealing to the sentencing judge directly by demonstrating that Parnas provided substantial assistance to Congress in its impeachment probe. “I don’t need a 5k letter from the government to go to the court and say, ‘Lev has tried to cooperate with the congressional inquiry,” Bondy said, referring to the letter a prosecutor gives to a court to indicate that a defendant has cooperated.

“A reduction in the sentencing guidelines is possible from assisting with a congressional inquiry,” he noted.

Still, it’s an unusual approach—and a gamble, his peers say.

“It’s not how I would handle it,” said one defense lawyer who requested anonymity to discuss the case. “I’d be quietly negotiating with SDNY.”

But it’s quintessentially Bondy, according to those who know him. It also fits with one of his other go-to tactics: challenging the very people who might decide a client’s fate.

“He doesn’t cower to authority,” said Eric Franz, a defense lawyer who has worked with Bondy on mob cases. “He’s incredibly brave,” said Jacob Plowden, co-founder of the Cannabis Cultural Association and a co-host of Bondy’s podcast In the Know 420.

Bondy recently wrote a letter to Bill Barr—which he filed on the public docket, ensuring it instant publicity—asking the attorney general to recuse himself from any involvement in Parnas’ case, given Parnas’ claims that Barr was “basically part of the team” that was trying to get dirt on Biden.

The letter, which sparked “BREAKING NEWS” chyrons and dozens of news articles, was not just a throwaway stunt intended to raise public awareness about Parnas’ allegations, Bondy says—rather, it was a highly deliberate move made only after “months” of studying the “nuanced and palpable relationship” between Barr and Trump’s associates, including Giuliani and Victoria Toensing. “Barr is interwoven into the facts of this case,” Bondy says.

Still, it wouldn’t be the first time Bondy used this kind of shock tactic: In the Gotti case 15 years ago, Bondy accused Manhattan District Court Judge Richard Casey of “becoming an advocate for the prosecution” and called for a new trial. That, too, spawned dozens of headlines.

“He’s using the media to speak to the people in power,” Franz said. “Sometimes you have to do that to deliver the message.”



***

While Bondy shies away from the “mob lawyer” label, he is unabashedly a pot lawyer, and something of a pioneer in what is now, thanks to legalization pushes in dozens of states, an exploding field.

Cannabis law, Bondy told POLITICO, is directly tied to criminal defense law and an integral part of his identity as a “people’s lawyer.” He’s defended those facing federal marijuana charges and helped clients secure business licenses, and has been a member of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) Legal Committee for 23 years, he said. In New York, he’s a longtime fixture in the nascent cannabis scene, an amalgam of large medical marijuana businesses, underground operators and CBD startups. He hosted the cannabis podcast In the Know 420 and served on the board of cannabis advocacy organization Cannabis Cultural Association (CCA).

Those who’ve worked closely with Bondy praised his integrity and commitment to the cause.

“He’s a very effective advocate at sentencing with regard to cannabis-related matters — federal sentencing in particular,” said David Holland, a fellow criminal defense attorney and cannabis advocate who is also involved with NORML.

Bondy is also one of the lawyers who brought a lawsuit against Trump’s Justice Department seeking to legalize pot under federal law.

“He put in how many thousands of dollars of free work into a lawsuit — a good portion of which is about the harms of the war on drugs and cannabis prohibition,” said Leland Radavonovic, a founding member of the Cannabis Cultural Association. The lead attorney on that case, Michael Hiller, described Bondy’s work on it as “invaluable.”

It’s still unclear how Bondy landed on Parnas’ radar (Bondy will say only that Parnas called him and asked him to take on his case). But the SDNY indictment offers a clue: Prosecutors have alleged that beginning in July 2018, Parnas and his associates illegally used money from a Russian national to donate to state and federal candidates and politicians in Nevada, New York and other states in an attempt to get retail marijuana licenses and form a recreational pot business.

Prosecutors have not ruled out bringing more charges against Parnas, which is why some lawyers and experts consider Bondy’s strategy so risky—the publicity will likely end when the impeachment trial does, one defense lawyer pointed out.

And unlike with another famous Trump fixer, Michael Cohen, New York prosecutors have so far “refused to meet with” Parnas and receive his evidence on those higher up the food chain in exchange for a cooperation deal, according to the letter Bondy wrote on Monday.

The letter cites Barr’s alleged “conflict of interest”—Parnas has claimed that the attorney general was involved in Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine—as one potential reason why prosecutors have not assessed Parnas as a potential cooperating witness. (The Justice Department has rejected that as “100% false.”)

Franz, the defense lawyer who’s worked with Bondy on several cases, said the fact that SDNY has “iced out” Parnas only makes an unorthodox approach more necessary.

Maybe so—but Gotti, perhaps Bondy’s most famous client to date, was ultimately convicted of extortion and plotting to murder former Gambino underboss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

To Bondy and his allies, who have noted that Gotti was spared a life sentence, it just proves the point.

“When you ain’t got nothing, you ain’t got nothing to lose,” Franz said. “I have no doubt that any underdog is in good hands with Joe carrying their flag into battle.”