♪ howie: a massive media debate around the globe as president trump cancels his meeting with north korea prompting scorn and speculation. >> it's not a good idea to give undue credit to donald trump before it's due. >> it shouldn't be a surprise that north korea feels this way about john bolton. how could the president have not known that. >> i think little rocket man was put in his place. >> let the media cheer another trump setback. let them rally against peace and

american leadership around the world. but trump may pull off a peace deal yet. howie: a leaked audio shows a white house aide conducting background briefing. president trump pushes his justice department to investigate an informant being put town his campaign. >> donald trump is trying to destroy this investigation. that's what's going on here. donald trump should be grateful for obama's fbi that spied on him. people who wrote this crap should be ashamed. >> why be can't people say the fbi investigates people. that's what we do.

if we think a foreign power is involved with one of our presidential campaigns, that's our job. >> we sent the informant in to protect donald trump. we are stalking you as a favor. howie: the media lionized elizabeth holmes as a superstar and her blood testing theranos as groundbreaking. >> elizabeth holmes is part of the new "time" 100 list just out. howie: it all came crashing down on charges of fraud. i'm howard kurtz and this is

"mediabuzz." white house correspondents were preparing for a june 12 visit to singapore when the president scrapped the sit-down with north korea's dictator. president trump: i believe this is a tremendous setback for north korea and a setback for the world. if and when kim jong-un chooses to engage in constructive dialogue and actions, i am waiting. howie: now the president says the meeting may be back on. joining me, mollie hemingway, sara fischer and adrienne elrod. north korea had been using such harsh rhetoric, the president may have had no choice you to cancel this. mollie: "the washington post"

repeated multiple times that there was no way donald trump would walk away from the summit because he needed it so bad. if he does walk away, they say he's a bad negotiator. a little less trump focus might be helpful. howie: media skeptics like to say this is an example of trump's foreign policy being erratic. but don't the north koreans bear some responsibility? adrienne: it doesn't happen in a vacuum but the media had a right to be sceptical. donald trump from the beginning, it almost seemed it was too good to be true. he was able to get this meeting quickly and both sides started

squabbling back and forth. so i think the media has every right to view this with scepticism and has the right to provide scepticism when the meeting was cancelled. howie: many in the media didn't like it when president trump was using incendiary language. and saying enough preparations had not been laid, and the media didn't like it when he canceled. sara: this is the way he does negotiations. so to take one perspective when it looks like it's going one way, you have got to take a step back and look how it's a big part of his deal making. howie: let me read to you this

controversy is kind of exploding this morning. presidential tweet saying the failing "new york times" quotes a senior white house official who doesn't exist saying even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on june 12 would be impossible. wrong again. audio was leaked to at journalist showing the person her who trump said didn't exist is a senior white house official conducting a background briefing. but i think it's a fair question. what about the president saying the person doesn't exist. and what about somebody who agreed to abide by the rules of the background briefing leaking it. sara: reporters are not supposed to be leaking information when they agreed it was a background meeting.

we now clearly the official does exist. howie: let me put up a graphic showing what the unnamed white house official said. the audio contains this as well. there isn't a lot of time, we lost a lot of time. june 12 is in 10 minutes. mollie hemingway donald trump says june 12 is possible. but his aides said impossible. the aide did say there is not a lot of time. the ball is in north korea's court. the "new york times" did a horrible job characterizing what he said, they say he exists. did the "new york times" say something correct or incorrect when it said donald trump is at odds with his aides. they just need to show him saying it's impossible.

how already clearly the "times" overstated the statement. mollie: should he have said you mischaracterized the real person? but the problem is the news media have to be accurate. this was a major part of the story. they are saying the aide is at odds with the president. they don't have the evidence to support that claim. >> there is a pattern where president trump says with people they don't like. the president said he doesn't exist. adrienne: donald trump's erratic

behavior is on full display. whenever he is frustrated with the way the media is covering any story he's involved with. he tries to disparage the source. he took a standard knee jerk reaction approach and he was wrong. this is somebody in his administration. howie: you can say the source was wrongs, biased or had an agenda. but this was at least a real person. the president demanding a justice department investigation, that "new york times" report on an fbi informant having penetrated the trump campaign. president trump: if you look at clapper, he admitted they had spies in the campaign yesterday inadvertently. i hope it's not true, but it

looks like it is. a lot of bad things happened, we are calling it spygate. you are calling it spygate. howie:' they are saying the president crossed the line asking the doj to look into this. mollie: this is an interesting think to say it shouldn't be looked into. the american people need to know what protocols were followed. what made them think this was an okay thing to do. you need that to restore confidence in our law enforcement. the president has oversight over the department of justice. the department of justice is behaving improperly by not turning over to congress

information they subpoenaed. howie: it does seem to me the president has the right to demand accountability about what was at the very least an undercover effort aimed at his campaign. adrienne: sara: his campaign was the entity under investigation. the fbi was using its standard protocol process to gather information. this time it happened to be the president's former campaign. howie: sarah, president trump tries to write the media headlines. he tells reporters, you are calling it spygate, except most of of them weren't. but now some of them are. sara: at the end of the day his branding techniques are what he

uses to get the message out. if he thinks it's a spy, he'll label it spygate. now all the media is picking up on it. howie: it's short, it fits in a one-column headline. president trump quoted you in a tweet, you said on the air everyone knows there was a spy and people involved in the spying are admitting there is a spy. mollie: it's true former intelligence officials including clapper and comey. we were doing this but we don't call it a spy. clapper said i don't like the term spy but we were using spies. he did acknowledge they were doing this. this is scandalous by any measure. to pretend this is not a big deal and an opposey party was doing this.

the journalists should be clamoring to find out what happened. we have a fbi as a rule of standard operation spying on' political campaigns. all of the things we have learned by the were part of a setup by the government itself. that's a huge issue. howie: we'll have more our discussion about the president and the fbi. the press is claiming vindication with the arrest of harvey weinstein.

howie: adrienne elrod, i think sometimes the media loses the thread. either the fbi hired this informant because of russia contacts by carter page and george papadopoulos. or whether the obama administration did this for political purposes. we don't fully know, do we? adrienne: the department of justice was conducting an investigation separate from what president trump was telling the department of justice to do. the department of justice felt it was the right thing to do, to send an informant into an entity that was under investigation. this is not because president obama said please send in a spy to cover trump's campaign. mollie: there are texts that show people in the department of

justice said the white house would be told what was going on. who knew what and when they knew it. i am shocked we don't have more journalists thinking this is a huge story, let's dig into it. howie: the question is, is it a story you dig into because this is a huge story bigger than watergate, the president says, or do you conclude it is one thing or the other. you agree there are unanswered questions? mollie: there might be reasonable explanations why four to seven people were wiretapped and there was at least one human informant sent in. secretly collecting information on behalf of the government ways we call spying. howie: some one in the "new york times" earlier said trump

repeats unproven claim about quote spy in campaign. the media is engaged in a semantic campaign. >> as people on the right might feel that this is a vindication for the president, and people on the left will say it's not a spy. it comes down to a whatever semantics. and i think it's going to be something we continue to debate for a bunch of weeks. howie: commentators are so locked into this idea of the fbi informant. do you think it cab sells itself out in this sense. but for people who aren't following it like we are supposed to do. that it all becomes a bunch of noise, and people just go on

with their lives? >> this is what president trump wants. yet again it's a distraction. it's another twaip that president trump and his allies use to discredit the fbi and the government institution. mollie: when the president said he was wiretapped, people in the media said that's not true. now that we know there are the wiretaps, national security letters, human intelligence. now they are saying it's not a big deal, it's standard operating procedure. howie: sara, i wanted to ask about a federal judge's ruling saying president trump on his twitter accounting not block people because he's a big public official. sara: they made this ruling

about all public officials. a few months ago the national archives said you can't delete a tweet without it going into the record. this is new understanding how all public officials will be monitored moving forward. howie: journalists block people all time as do others. thank you for joining us this holiday weekend. journalists gave rise to a cultural movement when they exposed the charges against harvey weinstein.

howie: less than a year after the "new york times" and the new yorker revealed a list of sexual assault allegations against harvey weinstein, he was arrested friday and charged with rape and a criminal sex act.

he's pleading not guilty complete with a new york perp walk. joining us is kat timpf. regardless of what happens in this particular trial. dozen of others are barred by statute of limitations. what is the impact for others to see harvey weinstein being led away in handcuffs. kat: i am sure many enjoyed seeing that pervert led away in hand cuffs. myself included. this is a moment many of his victims never thought they what see come. you always see men get away with this historically. and it looks like that's changing. howie: it's impossible to

overstate the impact, those stories about weinstein, the media, silicon valley, the corporate world, you name it. is it also a vindication of journalism as practiced by the "times" and ronan farrow bringing down someone who seemed to be untouchable and wielded so much power through the media and bullied people through the media, nobody those would actually be charged and led away in handcuffs. kat: i think it's a vindication and it represents a huge cultural shift. in the past men used to be able to get away with this if they had political impact. howie: one of the co-authors of

one of these investigative pieces quoted various things weinstein told victims in the past. one phone call and you are done. i have eyes and ears everywhere. she writes, not anymore. is there too much of a celebratory tone to some of these stories and tweets. as much as you and i may have enjoyed seeing weinstein brought down. this is also a tragedy that deeply affected the lives of many young and aspiring actresses. kat: sure. it was great to see him arrested. the pain he caused never goes away. also, hopefully this could send a message to other men out there. maybe you used to be able to get away with this behavior. but times are changing and you can't get away with it anymore.

howie: weinstein has become the preeminent symbol in many cases. kat timpf. thank you very much. coming up. bret baier on similarities between donald trump and ronald reagan. a reporter that exposed theranos.

howie: time for a deeper dive on the coverage of president trump's foreign policy. i sat down this morning with bret baier. , the author of "three days in moscow." the cancellation of the summit with kim jong-un after taunting him as little rocket man, and now the summit is back on. do all these moves in foreign policy make it difficult to cover donald trump? bret: yes. you don't know what's going to happen. also the logistics of following and covering a president. we were scheduled to go to singapore and planning ahead to how that was going to work and the travel and the shows. covering this summit to be. so as it fell apart, do you

cancel the ticket, do you not, do you hold on. right now we are in limbo and we'll see. >> you know, when the president threatens to pull out of nafta and he doesn't. he says he's going to withdraw his troops in syria then he pulls back. you have a group of commentators and analysts who say he's strategic and others say he's erratic. bret: we could be both. we don't know what's driving some of those decisions. it's clear that foreign governments look at him as unpredictable. in some cases that plays to their benefit, the u.s. in other cases it does not. it disturbs allies and causes problems. unpredictable is clear. why is not. howie: when ronald reagan was

proposing the nuclear freeze, reagan says what did 20 years patience get us. it sounds like donald trump. bret: there are a lot of similarities twin trump and reagan in their personality and style. and the threats are very similar. change the paradigm in washington in foreign policy is very similar. reagan upset the apple cart as far as detante and foreign policy. howie: both were outsiders. a two-term governor. president trump a businessman and reality tv star. i heard echos in the 1980

campaign. a lot of reporters said ronald reagan was a war monger and we heard that when trump and kim jong-un were at odds and trading nuclear threats. bret: we were going to war with ask north korea three or four months ago, but the prospect of sitting down at a summit is there. some aggressive speech and tweets and rocket man and how big is your button. that's not reagan style. but he was saying communism would be to the ash heap of history and the soviet union was the evil empire. at the time those things were seen as inflammatory. howie: reagan got a lot of bad press, revisionist history much better.

he said there they go again. the president obviously fights the press. bret: reagan was getting hammered by all the folks covering the administration. and pretty tough. every administration thinks they have it tough. they all complain. i think reagan had some argument to make. but you are right. he didn't internalize that or turn it around. he kind of blew it off and said maybe i can get them on my side if you explain it the right way. donald trump is the opposite. he's a counter puncher. he's shard scrabble new york. and he's taking it to the press. but politically he used this to hammer the media and picked up

his base to say that's fake news. howie: it's a very different time with twitter and social media. "60 minutes" came out in a forum and recalled a conversation she had with the president-elect. she said you beat up on the press all the time it's getting old and boring. >> he said i do it to discredit you all and demean you also when you write negative stories about me nobody will believe you. howie: assuming leslie stahl remembered this exchange correctly, what does it tell you. bret: i don't know the context. whether he was joking or not, half joking. serious. can you hear donald trump saying that? yes. if that's his thinking and

mentality, then that tells you something about some of the actions he has taken along the way. but i think it's strange that it's taken this long to hear this anecdote. i just think that there is not a lot here that we didn't know. i think it's disturbing if you think about that's really his motivation. i don't know that's 100% his motivation. until you see it, hear it or have context of it. howie: if you flip it around, there are some who view it as their job to discredit the president. bret baier, thanks very much for sitting down with us. good luck with the book. hbo hails john mccain as a hero. after the break, the press was casting elizabeth holmes as the next steve jobs until a "wall

street journal" reporter started investigating her company. investigating her company. he'll be here with the i got scar tissue there. same thing with any dent or dings on this truck. they all got a story about what happened to 'em. i could feel the barb wire was just digging into the paint. two bulls were fighting, hit the truck. another ding, another scratch, another chapter in the story. chevy silverado. the most dependable, longest-lasting, full-size pickups on the road. it's the chevy memorial day sales event! get a total value of over $10,000 on this silverado all star when you finance with gm financial. find new roads at your local chevy dealer. and i'm the founder of ugmonk. before shipstation it was crazy. it's great when you see a hundred orders come in, a hundred orders come in, but then you realize i've got a hundred orders i have to ship out. shipstation streamlined that wh the order data, the weights of , everything is seamlessly put into shipstation, so when we print the shipping ll everything's pretty much done. it's so much easier so now, we're ready, bring on t. shipstation. the number one ch

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howie: the media hailed elizabeth holmes as a silicon valley superstar when she launched her blood test company. she was very cool said

"glamour." "the next steve jobs." she was the face of the "forbes" 400. and television wasn't far behind. >> you are doing so so profound. the goal is to empower the individual. i regard you as a visionary next generation person. you have been referred to as steve jobs or bill gates. but we should refer to you as elizabeth holmes. what you are doing is revolutionizing the blood tests. >> i started this company to change the reality in our blood test system. >> you can have a huge impact on the healthcare system. >> that's our goal and our dream. >> a healthcare pioneer is being

compared to steve jobs and bill gates. howie: "wall street journal" reporter john carreyrou raised questions. elizabeth holmes played defense in a television blitz. >> for the first time elizabeth holmes is opening up the secret labs of theranos. >> at the highest level we didn't have the right leadership in the laboratory. >> you are fighting for the life of your company. what have the last six months been like for you. >> i am a better leader for it. i feel devastated that we did not catch and fix these issues faster. howie: the sec charged her with

massive fraud and she agreed to not be an officer of any company for 10 years. joining us is john carreyrou. author of "bad blood, secrets and lies." how does the media give such rocket fuel to a young woman and her company that turned out to be a fraud. >> theranos was founded in 2003 when she dropped out of stanford. it operated under the ray dafort media for four years. she had been around for a longer period of time than many silicon valley startups. you would expect to have achieved something during that period of time. the company claimed to have

pioneered groundbreaking new science where the company had a device that could run the full range of laboratory tests from just a drop of blood from the finger. howie: if it were true. and she got an op-ed piece in the "wall street journal." all these luminaries. you were talking to tyler schultz as a source. edcalled you. what happened then? >> my first original source wasn't tyler but he was an important corroborating source. i first made con account with him through linkedin. then one afternoon at "wall street journal"'s manhattan

headquarters. he's terrified. he's got a burner phone. he starts telling me about his experience at the company which lasted 8 months and ended with him trying to raise his concerns with elizabeth and her boyfriend who was number two in the company. they basically told him in no uncertain terms that he was too young and too green and didn't know what he was talking about and told him to shut up or leave. so he ended up leaving. at which point elizabeth called his grandfather george, the famous former secretary of state and told him if tyler persisted in pursuing this vendetta against her, he would lose. howie: elizabeth wouldn't talk to you. but you met with her high-powered lawyer and it got

hot. >> they came to our offices at the "wall street journal" in 2015. heather king who had been a partner, and boyce. and we met with them for five hours. and they took a very aggressive stance which was that i had misappropriated theranos trade secrets and i needed to destroy them or return them immediately. it was a surreal meeting. i kept trying to get substantive answers to my questions such as how many tests were run on theranos device and how many were run on commercial analyzers. they wouldn't answer any of the questions and kept invoking trade secrets. w --

howie: one of the people who put personal money into the company was rupert murdoch. how much did that complicate your reporting? >> i actually didn't know by the. before we went to press i hadn't heard about it and i heard vague rumors and i wasn't able to confirm them. i was digging into the company for nine months before we published that first story. there was no interference that i could see. it wasn't a factor for me. when i finally got confirmation he was not tomorrow an investor, but the single largest investor, having put $125 million in the company i lettered that a year later. howie: i have got about half a minute. all these magazine covers we

showed, the tv segments, the next steve jobs. looking back in hindsight it seems like a serious indictment of business journalism to provide all that hype for something that turned out to be so flawed. >> you could make an argument that some reporters should have asked more questions and consulted more experts. but i'm inclined not to fault people who wrote about her too much because she was outright lying to them. she was bald faced lying to them again and again. they didn't have any reason to think they were dealing with a pathological liar and fraudster. howie: that's why we have investigative reporters like you. ahead on "mediabuzz." a documentary on john mccain.

howie: the hbo documentary on john mccain that airs monday is extremely favorable. >> i have not always done the right thing, but you will never talk to anyone who is as fortunate as john mccain. howie: they showcase the praise for the republican senator who is battling brain cancer from barack obama, joe biden, and clinton. and he's had a warm relationship with fourth estate. >> it's always a pleasure to appear before the journalistic community or what one of my advisors affectionately calls my

base. howie: he is a war hero who refusedder release. and he's a figure in the republican party. he voted against repealing obamacare in that dramatic late-night vote. i first got to know the senator during the presidential campaign. he didn't have much money and he would answer questions and then we would talk about sports or movies. the press cast mccain as a maverick. the pundits wrote off mccain's second campaign in 2007. but once he won the nomination and he was running against obama, the media questioned his temperament. journalists rediscovered he was in fact a conservative

republican. when he emerged as a critic of donald trump, the press started admiring him again. he was ensnared in the banging scandal. and he didn't call for the removal of the confederate flag in south carolina because he didn't want to lose the primary there. now as he fights his last battle, the media shouldn't paint john mccain as a saint, but report fairly on his courage, compromises and contradictions. that's it for this edition of "mediabuzz." i hope you are enjoying this memorial day weekend. you can continue the conversation on

mediabuzz@foxnews.com. we'll see you next sunday at . .

sandra: it is monday, may 28th. this is "fox & friends first." happening right now at 4:00 a.m. here on the east coast. streets turn to raging rivers. states of emergency just declared over dangerous flash flooding along the east coast. and now several gulf states bracing for a direct hit by a subtropical storm. we are tracking your memorial day forecast. and saving the summit. the white house delegates in north korea right now prepping for potential meeting. so, will it actually happen? what kim jong un and president trump have to say. >> many people think that the ultimate sacrifice is giving up your life. but these soldiers gave up not only their lives but their