Cable news anchors pick and read highlights from the 1st batch of House impeachment transcripts

"We are now starting to see the actual testimony from the depositions in the impeachment inquiry so far, the transcripts, and they are as damning as expected for the president and his allies," MSNBC's Chris Hayes said Monday evening. The two transcripts span a combined 500 pages, and he picked out some highlights, noting that Michael McKinley, the former top aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, contradicted Pompeo's public comments, and that former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch said she was warned by Ukrainian officials months before her ouster that Rudy Giuliani and his associates were trying to bring her down.

"Because what they said is so significant, and at times mysterious, we're going to do something a little bit different tonight and read some of the most important passages word-for-word," Anderson Cooper said on CNN. "And we'll try to link up the moments that really build a narrative that, according to these two officials, illustrate a State Department in Washington operating at cross-purposes from diplomats around the world, and a White House that was undermining those diplomats for purposes that seem to have more to do with President Trump's political interests than U.S. national security."

Cooper started with McKinley and dwelled on Yovanovitch's recounting of the circumstances of her abrupt recall from Ukraine. "Now this is not, it is safe to say, how any of this is really supposed to work," he said, "not the ambassador's removal, not career first aid through Twitter, not alleged phone calls to [Sean] Hannity or the president's TV lawyer scuttling about gathering dirt, not any of it."

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MSNBC's Brian Williams also ran through some of the transcripts' key passages before linking the depositions to other Trump legal issues and asking his panel of reporters what it all means.

Fox News focused on other topics during its prime-time lineup, but its news team did note some highlights when the transcripts were released earlier Monday. Watch below. Peter Weber