(Exclusive.) On Monday morning, the Wall Street Journal’s Editor in Chief, Emma Tucker, returned to the Journal’s newsroom at 1211 Avenue of the Americas from a vacation.

Tucker has had the wind in her sails in recent months after the Journal’s Donald Trump Jeffrey Epstein scoop, so some R&R was well deserved. 

Shortly after she got back to work, The Journal’s Financial Editor, Marie Beaudette, informed her that she was leaving the paper. Breaker broke the news a short time later.

Beaudette had a meteoric rise at the Journal and had graduated to be part of Tucker‘s inner circle, which also includes Deputy Editor Charles Forelle and Managing Editor Liz Harris.

Just last November, Tucker announced a big promotion for Beaudette that put her in charge of business, finance, and economic coverage.

“I am delighted to have Marie at the head of this effort and this coverage. Marie is a superlative editor who delivers the distinctive storytelling our audience demands. And she’s a bold leader with creative approaches to marshaling our work and our talent,” Tucker told staff at the time.

It was a promotion that Forelle had lobbied for, and which gave Beaudette a massive fiefdom. “She was given a role that was highly sought after internally, and she beat out a lot of well-known and well-liked candidates,” a person familiar with the matter told Breaker. At least two of those candidates were surprised by her appointment, given her past experience. “It’s a massive role where you’re effectively running large parts of the newsroom,” a Journal journalist told Breaker.

It also raised questions from staffers about what has been described by six people familiar with the situation as a “very close working relationship” between Forelle and Beaudette.

In January, the pair were among the contingent the Journal had sent to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Multiple attendees at The Wall Street Journal’s Journal House recounted to Breaker that the pair seemed “extremely close” during the multi-day event where Forelle interviewed Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. “They were just always together,” one person who was there from the Journal told Breaker. 

That chatter only intensified in March after they arrived together in San Francisco to conduct a round of layoffs that gutted the Journal’s SF bureau.

Breaker has learned that a number of concerns were raised about the situation with Tucker in June, prompting her to…