What did the White House National Security Council say about why it forwarded the letter to ambassadors?

1. What was forwarded and to whom

Reporting by PBS correspondent Nick Schifrin and outlets that republished his sourcing show the text of a letter from President Trump to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, and those same reports state the letter was distributed by White House National Security Council staff to several European ambassadors in Washington ^{[1] [2]}. Tribune India adds that the NSC staff told those ambassadors to share the text with their respective heads of government or state, describing the distribution as including explicit instructions for further circulation ^[2].

2. What the National Security Council publicly said — the reporting gap

None of the provided sources includes a quoted statement from the National Security Council that explains why the NSC forwarded the letter, and reporters who published or reposted the letter did not cite an NSC spokesperson offering a rationale in these items ^{[1] [2]}. Because the available reporting documents the act of distribution but does not record an NSC justification, it is not possible on the basis of these sources to state the NSC’s official reason in its own words ^{[1] [2]}.

3. How journalists framed the NSC’s action

News accounts emphasize the unusual nature of an NSC staff distributing a personal presidential letter directly to foreign ambassadors, and they reproduce the letter’s provocative lines — including references to the Nobel Prize and to Greenland — to show why the note would attract diplomatic attention ^{[1] [2]}. Those stories treat the forwarding as a factual description of how the letter reached multiple European capitals via diplomatic channels, but do not attribute a publicly stated NSC motive beyond the mechanics of distribution ^{[1] [2]}.

4. Plausible official rationales and competing interpretations

In the absence of a recorded NSC explanation in these reports, several reasonable interpretations emerge from how the NSC normally operates: forwarding material to ambassadors could be framed as a way to inform allies of the president’s views on matters tied to foreign policy or security, or to encourage allied capitals to coordinate responses — roles the NSC routinely plays in coordinating policy across agencies and with foreign partners ^{[3] [4]}. Conversely, critics could see the move as politicizing diplomatic channels to broadcast a personal grievance or to pressure allies, an interpretation reinforced by the letter’s nontraditional content and the reported instruction to share it with heads of state ^[2]. The sources, however, do not record the NSC endorsing either rationale, so both remain media interpretations rather than documented NSC statements ^{[1] [2]}.

5. What the record supports and what it does not

The documented facts in the provided reporting are narrow and concrete: the president wrote a letter to Norway’s prime minister; PBS (via Nick Schifrin) published a copy; and White House NSC staff forwarded that text to several European ambassadors with reported instructions to circulate it upward in their governments ^{[1] [2]}. What the record in these sources does not include is an attributable NSC explanation — no internal memo or quoted spokesperson is presented here saying, for example, that the forwarding was intended to advance a security policy objective or to solicit allied cooperation ^{[1] [2]}. Any assertion about “why” the NSC acted therefore moves beyond the available sourcing and becomes inference, not citation.

Conclusion

The available reporting establishes that National Security Council staff distributed President Trump’s letter to European ambassadors and asked them to pass it on to their leaders, but the sources provided do not contain a direct NSC statement explaining the reason for that distribution ^{[1] [2]}. Analysis must therefore distinguish the documented chain of distribution from speculative motives; official intent from the NSC remains undocumented in these files and would require an attributable NSC communication not present in the cited reporting ^{[1] [2]}.