President Donald Trump called his son-in-law a “good boy” while thanking Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker for a positive editorial about Kushner and said the leader of the Boy Scouts told him his jamboree speech was “the greatest speech ever made to them.”
The comments, made to The Wall Street Journal and obtained in a transcript by POLITICO, show Trump holding forth at length with Baker and engaging in a familiar back and forth. Baker, according to the transcript, asked many of the questions and took the lead byline on the
main piece about the interview as well, an unusual step for the editor in chief of a paper with a large White House reporting staff.
The Journal has not published a full transcript of the interview. The newspaper posted
certain excerpts of the transcript online, but the full version has circulated around the Journal newsroom as well as among others in New York and Washington.
Matt Murray, the Journal's deputy editor-in-chief, warned staffers in a conference call in recent days about leaking the transcript, saying it would be a breach of trust, according to several sources familiar with the call.
"Damn right I told them that. It's true," Murray said on Tuesday via a Journal spokesperson.