"The president has said he did not know him," Grisham said. "And I've got to say, you know, just to say Rudy told me these things doesn't mean that it has anything to do with the president, and it certainly doesn't mean that the president was directing him to do anything."

Parnas on Wednesday went on to say he and Trump’s team used both U.S. military aid and visits by American officials to Ukraine as bargaining chips in getting the Ukrainians to open an investigation into the Bidens. Getting an American dignitary at Zelensky’s inauguration was in some regards an even higher priority to the Zelensky administration than receiving aid, Parnas said: An official visit by Trump or Pence would lend the young, inexperienced leader legitimacy points in the view of his people and an aggressive Russia.

But when the Zelensky administration made it clear there would be no investigation, Parnas said, Pence canceled his plans to attend the president’s inauguration.

“I remember Rudy going, ‘OK, they’ll see,’” Parnas told Maddow. “And basically, the next day Pence — to my awareness, Trump called up and said to make sure Pence doesn’t go there.”

In a statement Thursday, Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, cast doubt on Parnas' credibility.

“This is very simple: Lev Parnas is under a multicount indictment and will say anything to anybody who will listen in hopes of staying out of prison. It’s no surprise that only the liberal media is listening to him,” Short said.

Parnas also said Yovanovitch’s ouster was solely due to fears she would interfere with plans to spark an investigation.

“That was the only motivation. There was no other motivation,” he said.

House Democrats earlier Wednesday released a trove of correspondence linking Parnas with Giuliani and other Trump associates to Yovanovitch’s removal. As part of a separate cache of correspondence revealed Tuesday, House Democrats revealed messages between Parnas and a Republican House candidate, Robert Hyde, in which Hyde used menacing language to describe how to deal with Yovanovitch and bragged about surveilling the ambassador.

Parnas said on Wednesday he knows Hyde from the intermingling Trump circles of those who party after hours at the Trump hotel in Washington.

Parnas laughed in describing Hyde: “I don't know how to explain him. He’s a weird character. He’s a weird individual.” And Parnas said he never took Hyde’s comments seriously.

Still, Parnas apologized for the way he treated Yovanovitch, saying the campaign to fire and discredit her — assertions that she was badmouthing Trump — was built on falsehoods.

“I don’t believe it,” Parnas said. “That’s why I want to apologize to her, because at that point I believed it, but I don’t believe it now after reevaluating and seeing everything that transpired, looking at the documentation again.”

Parnas also alleged that Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, was in the same overlapping Trump circles and that he had been aware of the efforts to push Ukrainian officials for an investigation. When asked by Maddow whether he thinks it is inappropriate for Nunes to be on the committee given those ties, Parnas said, “I was in shock when I was watching the hearings and when I saw Devin Nunes sitting up there."

Parnas’ interview came on the same day House Democrats delivered their articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial. Trump was impeached last month on charges of abusing power and obstructing Congress.

Parnas was indicted alongside another Giuliani associate, Igor Fruman, on charges of violating campaign finance laws by making illegal contributions to benefit Trump. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, which secured the indictments, declined to comment when asked earlier Wednesday about Parnas’ appearing for the MSNBC interview. Parnas has pleaded not guilty to the charges and has since secured permission from the federal judge supervising his case to cooperate with House impeachment investigators.

Trump has claimed to not know Fruman and Parnas, though social media posts include images of the three of them together in 2018. When asked by Maddow about Trump’s denial of knowing him, Parnas flatly responded: “He lied.”

Parnas also insisted to Cooper that Trump was “lying“ about not knowing him and said he would release further photographic evidence of their relationship if the president made that assertion again. “I welcome him to say that even more. Every time he says that, I’ll show him another picture,“ Parnas said.

But “the truth is out now, thank God,“ Parnas said, heralding House Democrats’ initial release of his new evidence on Tuesday as “a big day for us“ that he “was worried [was] not going to come.“

“I thought they were going to shut me up, make me look like the scapegoat and try to blame me for stuff that I [haven’t] done,“ Parnas said. “But with God’s help and the great legal team that I have beside me, we were able to get the information out. And now it’s out there.“

Caitlin Oprysko contributed to this report.