President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are set today to discuss peace and “dividing up assets” with Ukraine. Trump pushes ahead with deporting violent gang members, despite legal efforts to bring them back to the United States. And new reports show both British and German intelligence believed COVID-19 was created in a lab, but chose to suppress those findings.
It’s Tuesday, March 18, and this is news you need to know to start your day. If you’d rather listen to your news, today’s edition of the Morning Wire podcast can be heard below:
<iframe style="width: 100%; max-width: 660px; overflow: hidden; border-radius: 10px;" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trump-putin-phone-call-covid-lab-leak-coverup-3-18-25/id1576594336?i=1000699614850" height="175" frameborder="0" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation"></iframe>
<h2> Putin/Trump Face-off</h2>
<div id="attachment_893213" style="width: 927px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-893213" class="wp-image-893213 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Putin-vs-Trump-917x576.jpg" alt="" width="917" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Putin-vs-Trump-917x576.jpg 917w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Putin-vs-Trump-300x188.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Putin-vs-Trump-768x483.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Putin-vs-Trump-1536x965.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Putin-vs-Trump-2048x1287.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 917px) 100vw, 917px" />(Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)</div>
Topline: President Donald Trump is set to hold a potentially pivotal phone call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin today as the two sides move closer to a ceasefire in Ukraine.
Last week, the Trump administration proposed a 30-day pause in the fighting to allow for formal peace negotiations to kick off. The Ukrainians accepted that deal, prompting the United States to renew weapons shipments to Kyiv, but the Russians were more hesitant to agree on a ceasefire. At the moment, it seems that Putin will only agree to the deal if he has assurances that the United States would pause new weapons shipments to Ukraine and that Ukraine would not be allowed to mobilize new forces during the 30 days.
Over the weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters that &#8220;the Russians say &#8216;We support a ceasefire, but …&#8217; And then after the &#8216;but,&#8217; they start coming with various details to delay the process.” He says Putin is well aware that Western support for Ukraine is starting to dwindle and wants to drag out the ceasefire process to allow his forces to gain as much territory as possible ahead of negotiations, so he’ll have more leverage.
To that point, Moscow has recently launched a counteroffensive in the Kursk region — a territory in Russia that had fallen into Ukrainian hands last summer after a surprise incursion. Putin claims thousands of Ukrainian troops there are currently surrounded — he called on them to “lay down their arms and surrender” in exchange for their lives. The longer a ceasefire is delayed, the more time Putin will have to close in on those troops. For that reason, among others, Zelensky is calling on Trump to exert pressure on Moscow to accept the ceasefire. Over the weekend, he issued a plea for &#8220;maximum additional sanctions&#8221; on Russia if they continue to stall — for his part, Trump said “we can” do that, but “I hope it’s not necessary.”
The Terms: Putin has shown a clear willingness to continually throw Russians into the frontlines and is unlikely to end the war if it means coming back empty-handed. Specifically, he wants to formally retain control of Crimea and the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. Zelensky has insisted that he’ll never cede land to Putin, but at this stage, it’s all but guaranteed he’ll have to agree to some land being lost in order to end the war.
The potential deployment of peacekeeping forces to Ukraine will likely be another point of contention in negotiations. Putin has made clear from day one that he will never agree to a deal that includes NATO membership for Ukraine — Europe and the United States seem to have conceded that point. As an alternative, Ukraine has pushed for European peacekeepers within its borders after the war. European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, have already agreed to provide boots on the ground, although it remains unclear if Putin will accept a European-backed security guarantee.
<h2>Trump Deports Illegal Gang Members</h2>
<div id="attachment_892595" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-892595" class="size-large wp-image-892595" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2204881261-864x576.jpg" alt="SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR - MARCH 16: (----EDITORIAL USE ONLY - MANDATORY CREDIT - 'EL SALVADOR PRESIDENCY / HANDOUT' - NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS - DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS----) More than 250 suspected gang members arrive in El Salvador by plane, including 238 members of Venezuela's Tren de Aragua gang and 23 members of the MS-13 gang, who were deported to El Salvador by the US in San Salvador, El Salvador on March 16, 2025. El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele confirmed they will be sent to the country's infamous mega-prison at CECOP facility prison. San Salvador forces took heavy security measures. (Photo by El Salvador Presidency / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2204881261-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2204881261-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2204881261-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2204881261.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />El Salvador Presidency / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images</div>
Topline: A showdown over a planeload of suspected Tren de Aragua gang members has pitted immigrant activists against Trump. The administration is moving forward with the deportation of more than 250 individuals despite legal moves from the ACLU.
On Friday night, President Trump signed an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allowed suspected gang members in the country illegally to be deported without a judicial hearing. The signing wasn’t promoted, but the media caught wind of it on Saturday morning. The ACLU quickly filed a lawsuit trying to stop the deportations &#8212; a court order issued by federal Judge James Boasberg temporarily barred the Trump administration from deporting illegals under the 18th-century statute. By Saturday afternoon, however, the planes were already in the air, having departed from Texas to El Salvador, where the deported were to be housed in a prison for gang members. The Trump administration claims that by the time Judge James Boasberg’s order was issued, the flight was already outside United States airspace.
Border czar Tom Homan dismissed Judge Boasberg’s order, saying he and Trump will not stop until America is safe. “Every day, the men and women of ICE are going to be out there arresting criminal illegal aliens,” Homan said. “I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the Left thinks. We’re coming.”
The Trump DOJ filed a response to Boasberg’s order contesting the authority of a single judge to halt national policy efforts. “Plaintiffs cannot use these proceedings to interfere with the President’s national-security and foreign-affairs authority.” One senior official told Axios that there were discussions in the administration about whether the planes needed to turn back, but after meeting with legal counsel, they decided they could proceed with the deportations.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday that “if the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States, that&#8217;s a fight we are more than happy to take.” Trump and his team are testing the limits of executive power and likely expect this to be settled by the Supreme Court.
Judge Boasberg told the DOJ to provide details on the flights in a sworn declaration by noon ET today.
The Numbers: In the first 50 days of the Trump administration, ICE made more than 32,000 enforcement arrests, just a hair shy of the total number of arrests made in all of fiscal year 2024. Nearly half of those arrested were convicted criminals and about a third had pending criminal charges, meaning 75% of those arrested were accused or convicted criminals. Illegal border crossings also fell by 94% in February compared to the previous year, and illegal encounters at the Del Rio Sector declined by 99% since 2023.
<h2>Covid Lab Leak Proof</h2>
<div id="attachment_893205" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-893205" class="wp-image-893205 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Lab-Leak-Image-1024x540.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="540" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Lab-Leak-Image-1024x540.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Lab-Leak-Image-300x158.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Lab-Leak-Image-768x405.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Lab-Leak-Image-1536x810.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Lab-Leak-Image-2048x1080.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />(Photo by Kobus Louw via Getty Images)</div>
Topline: We learned this week that the former head of the U.K.&#8217;s foreign intelligence agency told the British prime minister in early 2020 that COVID-19 escaped from the infamous Wuhan lab. The revelation follows reports out of Germany showing that its government allegedly had similar information, as did the United States and China.
This week, a memo sent by the former head of MI6 to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson revealed that as early as 2020, British intelligence believed that COVID was leaked from a Chinese lab and that the Chinese government was conducting an international disinformation campaign to avoid taking responsibility for an outbreak that would go on to kill millions of people.
The memo says, beyond a reasonable doubt, “the Wuhan Institute of Virology retro-engineered a bat virus in January 2020. We surmise that this was done to align with COVID-19 to sustain the natural causation narrative.”
The German Connection: A few days before the British announcement, two major newspapers in Germany revealed that the German foreign intelligence service, their version of the CIA, had also believed that there was an 80 to 90 percent chance that the coronavirus had leaked from a Chinese lab.
“The implications of this conspiracy &#8212; I think it&#8217;s the correct word in this case &#8212; are pretty significant,” independent journalist Michael Shellenberger told Morning Wire. “It would suggest that the U.S., U.K., Chinese, and German governments all knew that the virus escaped from the lab, arguably as early as January, and we had reported that the U.S. intelligence community had known, in fact, the names of the first three people to be infected by the Covid virus, and that didn&#8217;t come out.”
Congressional investigations <a href="https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114270/documents/HHRG-117-GO24-20211201-SD004.pdf">found</a> that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where COVID-19 is thought to have originated, received funding for gain-of-function research on coronaviruses from the American National Institute of Health.
Shellenberger told Morning Wire that the memo “obviously implicates a number of senior American officials, including Anthony Fauci, but it may have meant that our response to the virus may have been different had we known that it had come from a lab.” Fauci was issued a preemptive pardon by former President Joe Biden shortly before President Trump took office. Trump has argued that Fauci’s blanket pardon is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-declares-pardons-biden-gave-during-his-final-days-in-office-void">“void”</a> because it was signed with an autopen.

<script async src="https://www.instagram.com/embed.js"></script>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script><div data-widget-host="revcontent" data-pub-id="165152" data-widget-id="290588"></div><script src="https://delivery.revcontent.com/165152/290588/widget.js"></script>

Morning Brief: Trump And Putin Talk Terms, Deportations Continue, And The Lab Leak Gets More Proof

CONTINUE READING

Morning Brief: Trump’s High-Stakes Address To Americans & Tourists Trapped In Cartel Crossfire

Morning Brief: Iran Talks Heat Up, Mar-A-Lago Intruder, & Team USA On Fire

Morning Brief: Trump Warns Iran & Prince Andrew Arrested

Morning Brief: U.S. Surrounds Iran, Prisoners Get ‘Gender Surgeries,’ & FDA’s Moderna Reversal

Morning Brief: Trans Gunman Kills Family, Iran Stalls For Time, & Trump Stays Neutral In Texas

Morning Brief: Rubio Rocks Munich & A Shocking Army Contract Exposed

News

Communist China

COVID

Deportations

Illegal Immigration

Politics

Ukraine-Russia War

Vladimir Putin

Volodymyr Zelensky

A video goes viral showing a baby being refused his mother by two gay "dads". This is just the tip of the iceberg, which is why we will have an important discussion today about surrogacy. 

Hour 1

The Matt Walsh Show

Ep. 1765 - This Video Is One Of The Worst Things I've Seen In A Long Time 

The Strait of Hormuz officially opens for business (kind of), the Pope makes “shocking” comments on immigration, and President Trump promises UFO disclosure at TPUSA. 


The Michael Knowles Show

Ep. 1956 -  Pope Leo's "SHOCKING" Immigration Comments EXPLAINED

A false miscreed has corrupted our leadership class.


The Andrew Klavan Show

Ep. 1275 - Dumb, Dumber and Progressive

President Trump announces a 10-day ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, a murder-suicide involving former Democratic Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax shakes Virginia, and France and Britain hold a conference to secure the Strait of Hormuz – after the Iranian conflict ends. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.

- - -

Ep. 2738

- - -

Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3

- - -

Today's Sponsors:

Alliance Defending Freedom - Visit https://JoinADF.com/WIRE or text 'WIRE' to 83848 to learn more.

Pocket Hose - Text MORNING to 64000 to get a FREE pocket pivot and their 10-pattern sprayer with the purchase of ANY size Copper Head hose. Message and data rates may apply.

Morning Wire

U.S. Expands Hormuz Blockade & VA Fairfax Deaths Investigated | 4.17.26

U.S. Expands Hormuz Blockade & VA Fairfax Deaths Investigated | 4.17.26 [Member Exclusive]

A ceasefire goes into effect between Israel and Lebanon, a tragic murder-suicide rocks Virginia, and Dairy Queen deploys AI in the drive-thru. Get the facts first with Evening Wire.
- - -
Ep. 2737
- - -
Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3 
- - -
Today’s Sponsor:

Alliance Defending Freedom - Visit https://JoinADF.com/WIRE or text “WIRE” to 83848 to learn more.


Evening Wire: Lebanon Ceasefire Begins & Murder-Suicide Rocks VA | 4.16.26

The Pendragon Cycle

Menu

— News —

Morning Brief: Trump And Putin Talk Terms, Deportations Continue, And The Lab Leak Gets More Proof