Morning Brief: Get A Sneak Peak Of Daily Wire Investigative Reporter Luke Rosiak’s Senate Testimony

Trump leans on both Ukraine and Russia as peace negotiations grind on, Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak heads to Capitol Hill, and a new memo reveals Biden knew his immigration policies would have chaotic consequences—and chose to proceed anyway.

It’s Tuesday, December 9, 2025, and this is the news you need to know to start your day. Today’s edition of the Morning Wire podcast can be heard below, and the video version can be seen on The Daily Wire:

Zelensky Rallies European Support Amid U.S. Peace Talks

Topline: President Zelensky met with European leaders on Monday to rally support for the war.

State of play: Peace talks have made some progress over the past few weeks, but that progress has stalled. After President Trump appeared frustrated on Sunday and suggested that Zelensky was ignoring the peace plan, the Ukrainian president addressed the current framework on Monday.

According to Zelensky, the disagreement is over the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east. The Trump administration reportedly wants Ukraine to hand over control of the rest of the Donbas to Russia, which controls most of it already. In return, Ukraine would get security guarantees and financing to help rebuild. But Zelensky says he can’t because the Ukrainian constitution forbids ceding territory that way.

Zelensky’s corner: Zelensky wants a freeze along the current lines of the conflict. And he doesn’t appear to be alone. European leaders seem frustrated, too.

Zelensky appeared in London on Monday and met with the E3, or the top leaders in Europe: U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“The principles remain the principles that we’ve operated on for a very, very long time, which is that we stand with Ukraine. If there’s to be a ceasefire, it needs to be a just and lasting ceasefire,” said Starmer.

Merz was the most vocal about disagreements with the United States:

“We are still and remain strongly behind Ukraine and giving support to your country because we all know that the destiny of [Ukraine] is the destiny of Europe,” said Merz. “I’m skeptical about some of the details which we are seeing in the documents coming from the U.S. side, but we have to talk about that.”

The Daily Wire To Testify Before Congress 

Topline: Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak will testify to the Senate on Wednesday as an expert on what he calls the government’s longest-running, largest, and most corrupt DEI program. Morning Wire spoke to Rosiak ahead of his appearance in the Senate. (The following interview has been lightly edited.)

Morning Wire: The Senate Small Business Committee oversees the Small Business Administration and its government-wide minority contracting program called 8(a) or “set-aside contracting.” Luke, you’re getting prepared to testify–that’s very exciting. First, how did this come about–it’s actually years in the making, right?

Rosiak: About 15 years ago, I was sitting in a cafe doing some computer programming when I got offered a job. A well-dressed black man was sitting next to me and said he noticed that I was programming in C++, and that he needed to hire some people quickly for the computer programming company he owned.

The problem is I was coding in a different language that looks nothing like C++. I tried to figure out how he owned a computer company and didn’t know that. He said it was an 8(a) contract from the government, and that he just gets contracts and then finds people to do the work.

It struck me that this is a pretty poor way to run the government. I’m not even a professional computer programmer; I just dabble in it. But for all I know, he was ready to hire me to build some sensitive government system.

Anyway, instead of taking the job, I dug into this 8(a) program, and what I found was that that’s more or less exactly how it works.

Morning Wire: Explain to us–what exactly is going on here?

Rosiak: If you’re a racial minority, the government can give you a contract without trying to find the best price or the best person.

More than five percent of all federal contracts are reserved for minorities and women, who are often really just men who put their company in their wife’s name. The program was created in 1978 to help black people, but now it’s gone really off the rails. Indians get preference for contracts even though they have a higher median income than whites, and they’re overrepresented in fields like IT, which didn’t even exist prior to the civil rights era. 

Morning Wire: So some of the people receiving these preferential U.S. government contracts are actually foreigners, people who are minorities because they’re immigrants.

Rosiak: Yes. But what I’m going to tell the Senate is that the scandal here is a little different than you might think. It’s really a loophole exploited by the government and big corporations, you heard Accenture mentioned in that video, to circumvent competitive bidding.

Early Warnings About Border Chaos

Topline: A new report reveals that former President Biden was told he could’ve stopped illegal immigration, but chose not to during his tenure in the White House. 

A shocking report from The New York Times said that President Biden was warned while on the campaign trail, before he even assumed office, that some of his immigration policies would lead to political chaos. That’s exactly what happened as the consequences of Biden’s policies began to unfold at the border.

The record amounts of illegal immigration that swamped the border, then towns, then major cities, drove the immigration issue to become a priority for voters in the next election. The issue also likely played a major role in President Trump’s victory.

According to The New York Times, there were a number of memos and meetings where aides and experts brought up immigration and warned the Biden team that his policies needed to be stricter or the border would descend into what it became, which was millions of illegal immigrants coming across in a free-for-all.

In a 2020 memo from aides cautioned Biden’s “inner circle” “that his promises—coupled with pent-up demand from the Trump years and economic hardship from Covid—could provoke a spike in border crossings,” according to the Times.

The memo offered potential solutions to tighten permissions for illegal border crossers, “including making it easier to quickly reject asylum claims; holding people in ‘reception centers’ until their cases could be heard; transferring some migrants to other countries; and continuing to make some asylum seekers wait in Mexico, while ensuring they had access to shelter,” the Times reported.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda: After the fact, many former officials are saying there were many mistakes made on the Biden team and by Biden himself, who knowingly went against this advice. They scrapped rules such as asylum restrictions and remain in Mexico, which kept people in Mexico rather than releasing them into the United States after they crossed illegally.

After the changes, the number of illegal crossings ticked up–8 million illegal immigrants crossed into the country and many were released. Border authorities conducted poor vetting because Biden wanted a very quick, expeditious process. That let in terrorists, traffickers, and cartel members that led to chaos across the country, such as in Aurora, Colorado, where Tren de Aragua took over apartment complexes.