Two weeks after his election victory President-elect Donald Trump has started backing off campaign promises, including his hard line on climate change and his vow to jail "Crooked Hillary" Clinton.
A top adviser said Trump is now focused on matters that are essential in setting up his administration, not comments made during the heat of the campaign.
The change of tune has angered some of his conservative supporters.
If Trump's appointees do not follow through on his pledge to investigate Clinton for criminal violations he accused her of, "it would be a betrayal of his promise to the American people to 'drain the swamp' of out-of-control corruption in Washington," said the group Judicial Watch.
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And Breitbart, the conservative news site whose former head, Stephen Bannon, is now a senior counselor to Trump, headlined its story about the switch with Broken Promise.
After a year blasting The New York Times, Trump submitted to an interview with reporters and editors at the Times office where he spoke about conflicts of interest ("the law's totally on my side"), the "alt-right" (it's not a group I want to energise") and his relationship with fellow Republicans in Congress ("right now they are in love with me").
His interview comments on a possible prosecution of his former foe Clinton stood in stark contrast to his incendiary rhetoric throughout the campaign, during which he accused her breaking laws with her email practices and angrily barked at her that "you'd be in jail" if he were president.
"I don't want to hurt the Clintons, I really don't," Trump said in the interview. Sympathetically, he said, "She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways."
Though he declined to definitively rule out a prosecution, he said, "It's just not something that I feel very strongly about."
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As for global warming, Trump has repeatedly questioned the idea, suggesting at times that it is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to hurt US manufacturers with environmental regulations.
But on Tuesday, he said he would "keep an open mind" about pulling the United States out of the landmark, multi-national Paris Agreement on climate change and said "I think there is some connectivity" between human activity and climate changes.
Trump, who left late on Tuesday to spend Thanksgiving at his estate in Florida, also continued to work to populate his incoming administration, tweeting that he was "seriously considering" former GOP presidential rival Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Earlier on Tuesday, it was confirmed that Trump's charity had admitted it violated IRS regulations barring it from using its money or assets to benefit Trump, his family, his companies or substantial contributors to the foundation.
