David Bass is known in Washington as an accomplished PR executive and TV commentator, a man with an impressive Rolodex and a fixture on the D.C. social scene.

Or at least he was until Thursday, when word spread through town that Bass had been charged with a federal felony for loutish behavior on a Continental Airlines flight from Houston to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

An FBI agent and a couple of flight attendants say in court documents that Bass seemed drunk on the flight, disobeying instructions from the crew, climbing over another passenger to get to the overhead luggage bin, making “mean faces” and generally “upsetting everyone in first class.”

Bass says he was tired, “out of it” on allergy medication and doesn’t even know what a “mean face” is.

And his friends say that the allegations against him — punishable by as much as 20 years in federal prison — don’t sound like Bass at all.

“It runs contrary to my 20 years of knowing him to hear his behavior described as ‘aggressive’ or ‘confrontational,’” said Nick Swezey, advertising director at the Weekly Standard, where Bass was formerly the deputy publisher.

Added Weekly Standard writer Matt Labash: “Bass is proclaiming his innocence because he thinks he is. ... Obviously, everybody takes any airplane shenanigans very seriously these days. But threatening a guy with 20 years in jail because you don’t like his facial expressions when you deny him service seems a bit extreme.”

In an interview with POLITICO on Thursday, Bass said, “The last thing I would ever be is a threat to anyone on a plane.”

He said his PR clients “know me better than this. [My friends] would probably say, ‘Bass was joking a little more than he should have been.’”

And indeed, Bass has an established reputation in Washington as a hale fellow well met.

“If there’s a big event and he’s not there, everyone knows he must be out of town,” said Potomac Strategy Group political consultant Matt Mackowiak, a friend. “I’m worried for him. This is a terrible situation. It doesn’t sound like him.”

As first reported by the Washington Examiner, Bass is charged with violating a federal law that prohibits “assaulting or intimidating a flight crew member or flight attendant of the aircraft, interferes with the performance of the duties of the member or attendant or lessens the ability of the member or attendant to perform those duties, or attempts or conspires to do such an act.”

“Almost anything people see or do that appears hostile could become a federal offense,” said Kate Hanni, director of the Coalition for Airline Passengers’ Rights. “People really need to understand that they have to have a certain level of behavior on an aircraft.”

According to an FBI affidavit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, a flight attendant “stated that Bass refused to obey the instructions issued by the flight attendants and ‘disrupted everyone’ in as much as he entered the aircraft’s galley several times and crawled over the person seated next to him in order to access the overhead storage compartments and the aircraft’s lavatory. [The flight attendant] said that Bass’s behavior was so disruptive that [she] moved the passenger seated next to Bass to a different seat.”

Bass was questioned at the airport and subsequently charged with the federal crime. He appeared in court Tuesday and was allowed to remain free pending his next court date Oct. 27.

Bass told POLITICO that he had been in Honduras on a business trip and hadn’t slept for three days before boarding Friday’s flight. He also said that he’d taken Benadryl for an allergic reaction.

“I was extremely sleep deprived,” he said. “I have a bad history of traveling south.”

But once on the plane, he said he didn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t be served a glass of wine.

The flight attendants disagreed; in statements filed with the court, they said they decided among themselves that Bass should not be served alcohol on the flight.

And while the FBI affidavit said that Bass had assumed an “aggressive posture” with police at the airport, Bass said the incident was not confrontational at all.

“The officers were actually very nice. I had been joking a little bit, talking to them,” he said. “It didn’t seem like reality to me.”

Bass said he offered to take a blood-alcohol test when he got off the plane, but he said the officers declined.

Bass recently served as vice president and chief development officer at the public relations firm Luntz, Maslansky Strategic Research and also worked at Qorvis Communications. While at Qorvis, he provided some consulting services for POLITICO’s parent company, Allbritton Communications, during the publication’s start-up phase, and he has managed local political campaigns, ballot initiatives and other government affairs campaigns.

He got his start in Washington as a Senate legislative intern on Capitol Hill.

Bass recently founded Raptor Strategies, a public relations firm with energy, media and insurance clients. The firm’s slogan: “New times demand new strategies.”