In 2018, Lev Parnas says he was offered ten percent of what became America’s biggest weed company. Trulieve says that never happened. Then Rudy Giuliani pulled him into Ukraine, and the case that later put him in federal prison included a scheme prosecutors said was aimed at buying political influence tied to marijuana licenses with money from a Russian businessman.
In 2018, Lev Parnas says, he was offered a piece of what became the biggest cannabis company in America. He never got it. According to Parnas, he got pulled away to do Donald Trump’s dirty work in Ukraine instead, and ended up in a federal prison cell. The case that later put him in federal prison included a scheme prosecutors said was aimed at buying political influence to secure marijuana licenses with money from a Russian businessman.
He joins the call in a white t-shirt, a horseshoe on a chain around his neck, AirPods in, South Florida through the window behind him, and a volcano vape within reach.
Parnas grew up, by his own account, the sober one. The powerful men he ran with around the world drank and snorted their way through the night. “I was always like the clear-minded one in the group,” he says. Then, around twenty, somewhere near 1992, a friend at a club told him he was too wound up and handed him a joint. He says he took cannabis up deliberately, after reading about it. “The more I studied it,” he says, “the more I started understanding there were benefits to it.” He once carried it into Russia by accident, he admits.
Plenty of people in this industry pose as stoners, which is its own kind of strange, given how long stoners were marginalized for it. Parnas tells me he is not posing. Whatever else he is performing, the weed is real.
It was around then that he met Joseph Bondy, the cannabis lawyer and NORML advisor who would later become his criminal attorney. Together, they pitched legal weed to the newly elected Donald Trump.
The First Attempt at Legalizing Weed Was a MAGA Play
In 2018, Lev Parnas brought Donald Trump a memo on legalizing marijuana.
Bondy helped write it. Congressmen were involved. Parnas’s gateway was Don Jr., whom he claims was backing him, and he says Trump floated putting him in charge of lobbying a bipartisan cannabis committee. To Parnas, the sales logic was pure 2018: cannabis was going to be for Trump what crypto became six years later. A populist applause line, a young-voter magnet, free political juice.
“We were doing that same thing with cannabis,” he says, and it was going great until it ran into Pete Sessions. The Texas congressman has been kryptonite to cannabis legalization for the better part of a decade, a true believer who treated weed as the root of all evil and would not let anything through the House.
As everybody in Florida knows, a cannabis license is worth whatever scarcity makes it worth. When a state hands out only a handful, each one becomes an asset. Florida, Parnas recalls, started with five. A monopoly by design, structured so that you could not “pierce through.”
Which is arguably why Trulieve grew into what it is: the dominant operator in the country, roughly 240 dispensaries and about 1.2 billion dollars in annual revenue.
Florida’s medical program dates to 2015, when the state issued five regional licenses; voters broadly expanded it with Amendment 2 in November 2016. Trulieve was there from the start. It grew out of one of those five licenses, won in 2015 by a group of nurseries applying as Hackney Nursery, and opened the state’s first medical dispensary in July 2016, before voters even approved the expansion. Parnas nonetheless claims he is “the one who legalized cannabis in Florida.” He says he was offered ten percent of the company in 2018, as it was breaking out, before any of the rest of it happened.
“I tried to do it, but I couldn’t get the deal done,” he says. “I got side-railed with my political stuff, going to Ukraine, doing Trump’s work.”
Trulieve disputes both claims. “The statements concerning Trulieve are incorrect. Trulieve did not offer Mr. Parnas a ten percent stake in 2018,” the company told High Times. On the legalization claim, it added: “Florida’s medical cannabis program was established through years of work by patients, physicians, advocates, policymakers, and millions of Florida voters. No single individual can claim sole responsibility for that achievement.”
Who Is Lev Parnas?
He was born in Odesa in 1972, in Soviet Ukraine. His family fled when he was four and settled in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn—little Odessa. Before Trump, he had recently reassembled his life after the 2008 crash. Trump himself would later call him a “conman.”
Then, in 2018, Rudy Giuliani recruited him and his partner Igor Fruman into what Parnas himself, in his 2024 book Shadow Diplomacy, calls being an “operative.” The off-books campaign to pressure Ukraine into announcing an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden, and to remove the U.S. ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, who stood in the way. That effort, documented at length in Billy Corben’s 2024 documentary From Russia with Lev, put Parnas in rooms with the most powerful people in the country. On October 9, 2019, it put him in handcuffs at Dulles airport, holding a one-way ticket out of the country.
He became a central figure in Trump’s first impeachment. Then the case that had nothing to do with impeachment closed around him. In October 2021, a federal jury convicted Parnas on multiple counts. Prosecutors proved that he, Fruman, Andrey Kukushkin and a Russian businessman named Andrey Muraviev had moved roughly a million dollars through a chain of accounts to fund illegal U.S. political donations, including a $325,000 donation to America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC. The purpose, as the government put it, was to buy influence with officials who could hand them recreational-marijuana licenses in Nevada and beyond.
Parnas calls all of it a made-up tale.
In a separate case, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud. A company called Fraud Guarantee, which claimed to protect people from fraud, took in more than two million dollars from investors who never got it back. Fraud Guarantee is also the vehicle that paid Giuliani a $500,000 consulting fee.
At sentencing in June 2022, Judge J. Paul Oetken said fraud had become “a way of life” for Parnas, and rejected his claim that the prosecution was political payback. One investor, Dianne Pues, told the court Parnas “destroyed my life.” Another, Charles Gucciardo, told the court that instead of doing the work he had raised money for, Parnas “left to do marijuana work in Las Vegas.” The sentence was twenty months, three years of supervised release and roughly two million dollars in restitution.
He served part of it at Otisville, New York, the same facility that held Michael Cohen, and came out by 2023 telling a very different story.
“My case was all political,” he says. He was Trump’s man in Ukraine, squeezing Zelensky, chasing Hunter Biden’s laptop, with a front-row seat to executive power. Then the first impeachment gathered momentum and the FBI came knocking.
They first tried to paint him as a Russian spy, he says. An espionage case. According to Parnas, when his own evidence showed he was working for Giuliani and Trump, that story collapsed, so in his telling, they superseded the charges and convicted him on something technical.
“Checking a wrong box,” he says, like overstating your income on a credit-card form. “Nobody’s ever gone to jail for these types of things. I went to prison for donating money to Trump’s campaign. What about the campaign that took it?”
“Scapegoat,” he says.
MAGA Is a Cult I Built
Parnas was part of a cult in the making, or so he describes it. MAGA, he says, “is not the Republican party.”
“I was one of the leaders of that cult. It happened naturally,” out of belief. A belief in a deep state, in a country that had turned its back on its own people. What sustains it is what he calls boxing: “right-wing media 24 hours a day,” one station, one view, until “your mind stops believing that there is another view.”
Many scholars who study this resist the word cult because of oversimplification: a cult is small, sealed and organized around a living leader who runs his followers’ daily lives. MAGA is a mass coalition of tens of millions who go to work, disagree, get disappointed in their own government, and vote. Sectarianism is the better word. Parnas is not making an academic argument, though. He is describing what it felt like from the inside.
Alongside Daniel Parnas and David Sugarman, he has built a business on that. It is called Deep State Media. Trump taught him that the Democrats were the deep state. Prison and his new friendships taught him that both parties are the same deep state, one machine, “the offshore money that comes into our lobbyist systems, into our Congress.” Deep State Media exists, he says, to expose it. “I’ve been a part of so much criminality and crooked stuff, and I want to help fight it.”
So now his business is radical transparency. This is the same man who, ten minutes earlier, said he had been the original source of a claim now circulating widely, that Zelensky banned opposition parties in Ukraine. “A lot of the lies that I was putting out,” he said, plainly. “Russian disinformation to make Ukraine look a certain way.”
A man who manufactured narratives he now admits were false, who was the deep state’s own instrument, has launched a media company to expose the deep state, and intends to live-stream his congressional campaign “like the Kardashians.” Cameras in the backroom meetings. Total transparency.
When I told him there is already a show about a politician who does exactly that, and that it is called House of Cards, he laughed. “We’re going to cause a lot of controversy,” he said. “It’s going to be fun.”
Running as a What
In March 2026, Parnas announced as a Democrat, running in Florida’s 27th district to unseat Republican María Elvira Salazar. By June he had re-filed as an independent in a different seat entirely, the redrawn 22nd, after Ron DeSantis pushed through a mid-decade redistricting designed to net Republicans as many as four additional House seats. He is now one of ten candidates in FL-22: eight Republicans, one Democrat and Parnas. He says he chose it deliberately, to “beat DeSantis and Trump at their own game.”
Both parties failed us, he says, and a record share of Americans now call themselves independent. He is the candidate of the abandoned middle.
Except the abandoned middle barely exists. Gallup finds that only about 10 percent of adults are true independents leaning toward neither party, and half a century of political science shows that leaners vote almost exactly like the partisans they will not admit to being. Add the math of a system where most votes wins and everyone else gets nothing, which reliably collapses races into two viable candidates and hands the third the role of spoiler, and FL-22 was drawn to produce a Republican regardless of who runs.
Beating them at their own game is nonetheless how this ex-operator has decided to take back what he believes was stolen from him.
A New Man?
In the Corben documentary, Parnas apologizes in person, face to face, to Hunter Biden.
“Hunter Biden did not deserve what he got,” he says, and for once, it appears there is no angle in his voice. They are friends now.
A father of six, Parnas says the cult made him forget that the people he was destroying were somebody’s sons too. It is the realest thing he says, and it arrives, like everything good in him, wrapped around cannabis. He believes weed weans people off the hard stuff. He points to a California rehab that treats with it. He swears that if he gets to Congress, he will push past mere rescheduling toward the real thing.
He is still on federal supervised release, the three-year tail of his sentence, which squares with the timeline. And a federal judge, he says, granted him written permission to use cannabis while he serves it. High Times could not obtain the court order, and Parnas’s team did not provide it. He smoked on camera during the interview.
“That’s a big deal for the cannabis movement,” Parnas said.
So here is where we land. Lev Parnas spent years moving money and stories through the shadows, got caught, recast the catching as a crucifixion, and re-emerged selling the exact commodity he spent years trading away: the truth about how it actually works.
“To go after and uncover the corruption on both sides. It’s not about the left or the right. It’s about for the people, the corruption, the offshore money that comes into our lobbyist systems, into our Congress. My platform is running to uncover and explode all of this corruption.”
Out loud, in his campaign, and probably for a subscription fee.
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