Despite a discrepancy in its interview transcript with Donald Trump, the New York Times said Monday it would not backtrack on a story it published about the President-elect softening his stance on waterboarding.
"Since we were there, we felt we had a good reading of his remarks," Times' Washington bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller told the Columbia Journalism Review.
"[Trump] suggested he changed his mind about the value of torture. He then said, if you look at the transcript, that it's not going to make the kind of difference that people may think. It reflects, we thought, a shift in his value judgment."
The Times' story, written by Michael D. Shear, Julie Hischfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman, said Trump had "tempered some of his most extreme campaign promises" and, on the subject of torture, "had changed his mind about the value of waterboarding."
But the transcript reads differently, per Slate and The Intercept.
Trump, in the Times' story, said he was impressed with Gen. James Mattis' take on waterboarding – that it was not a useful tactic – and torture was "not going to make the kind of difference that a lot of people are thinking."
But the transcript reads "when he said that, I'm not saying it changed my mind."
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