What did PBS reporter Nick Schifrin publish and how did he obtain the Trump letter to Jonas Gahr Støre?
Executive summary
Nick Schifrin, PBS NewsHour foreign correspondent, published the text of a letter attributed to U.S. President Donald Trump to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre — posting the text publicly on X and saying the document had been circulated among European diplomats — and said he obtained the letter’s text from multiple U.S. officials and from National Security Council distribution that was shared with ambassadors [1] [2] [3]. Norwegian officials subsequently confirmed the message, and parts of the document were republished by outlets including Norway’s VG after Schifrin’s disclosure [4] [5].
1. What Schifrin published: the letter’s content and distribution
Schifrin posted the full text of a message attributed to President Trump in which Trump criticized Norway’s Nobel Committee for not awarding him the Peace Prize, wrote that he “no longer feel[s] an obligation to think purely of Peace,” and linked that grievance to renewed U.S. interest in Greenland, language that several news outlets reproduced after Schifrin’s post [1] [3] [4]. The PBS correspondent said the message had not only been sent to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre but also circulated by National Security Council (NSC) staff to multiple European ambassadors in Washington with instructions to share it with their heads of government or state, a detail Schifrin included in his reporting and social posts [3] [2].
2. How Schifrin says he obtained the letter: multiple officials and NSC circulation
Schifrin has been explicit in public posts that he “obtained the text from multiple officials,” and he flagged that NSC staff forwarded the letter to European ambassadors — a disclosure he used to corroborate the letter’s circulation beyond a single recipient [2] [3]. Multiple subsequent reports repeat Schifrin’s account that the document was being shared among diplomats in Washington, and that the PBS correspondent first made the message public [4] [6].
3. Confirmation and downstream publication: Norwegian sources and other outlets
Following Schifrin’s publication, the Norwegian prime minister’s office confirmed the communication’s existence, and Norwegian tabloid VG published the document as well, a sequence reported by several outlets that credited Schifrin with first posting the text on X [4] [5] [7]. International media — including Time, AFP-linked pages, and others — cited Schifrin’s post and repeated the core passages, amplifying the text across European and global press [1] [3].
4. Limits of available reporting and open questions about provenance
While Schifrin and multiple outlets report that he “obtained the text from multiple officials” and that the NSC distributed it to ambassadors, the publicly available reporting in these sources does not identify the specific officials who provided the letter to Schifrin, nor does it show an original signed president-to-prime-minister cover sheet; most accounts rely on Schifrin’s published text and confirmations from Norway and diplomatic circulation reported by him [2] [3]. Therefore, reporting establishes that Schifrin posted and attributed the letter and that the NSC circulated it, but does not reveal exactly which individual or office physically handed the text to the PBS correspondent [2] [4].
5. Competing narratives and implicit agendas to watch
The rapid spread of the text through Schifrin’s channel and then through allied capitals carried immediate geopolitical consequences, prompting reports about European responses and potential use of EU tools; those reporting threads reflect how a single, widely shared document can shape diplomatic signaling [1]. Sources quoting Schifrin frame him as having acted on multiple official confirmations, while publishers republishing the document have varying editorial agendas — from mainstream outlets emphasizing diplomatic alarm to tabloid and partisan outlets using the piece for sensational headlines — so readers should weigh the origins and amplification chain reported in the sources [3] [5] [7].