Not everyone who passes through the gold-accented Benjamin Bar at the Trump International Hotel in D.C. is there to be seen.
Zach Everson, a reporter who has turned its lobby into a beat, cringed as he was spotted by Harlan Hill, an advisory board member for the 2020 Trump campaign and Fox News pundit.
“You know who this guy is?” Hill shouted to his companions at the bar, who included Eric Bolling, the former Fox News host, before corralling a sheepish Everson to pose for a photograph.
Within minutes the picture had hit Twitter and Instagram.
It was a rare case of the tables turning on Everson, whose reports on the comings and goings at the Trump hotel offer an unconventional way of mapping who is up and who is down in this most unconventional of presidencies.
His scoops include spotting the prime minister of Romania and collecting sightings of John Legere, the T-Mobile chief executive, the day after the company’s merger with Sprint was approved.
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“This is unique in American history,” he said after escaping the attentions of the conservative pundits at the bar.
Reporter @Z_Everson spotted colluding and drinking at @TrumpDC #MAGA ?? pic.twitter.com/5toLFcKe3A
— Harlan Z. Hill (@Harlan) May 1, 2019
He was a freelance food and travel writer when he was commissioned by Fox News to cover the hotel opening in October 2016. Magazine pieces followed when Trump was elected.
The story only got bigger as businesses filed unfair competition lawsuits and congressional Democrats alleged that Trump’s private businesses violated the Constitution’s ban on gifts or payments from foreign governments.
Occasional commissions and social media posts soon became a newsletter, 1100 Pennsylvania, which today has 1600 subscribers.
Readers have learned about the three times the Kuwaiti Embassy celebrated the country’s independence day at the hotel. This week, they were treated to a special Rudy Giuliani issue, featuring 57 photographs of Trump’s lawyer posing with guests.
[Also read: Chinese woman arrested at Mar-a-Lago had device used to detect hidden cameras, thousands in cash in hotel room]
Everson broke off from telling his story to stare at a small party of new arrivals.
“Three of them just walked in, they had lapel pins,” he said. “You can figure out a lot of information in this town if you just have good knowledge of lapel pins.”
He will spend the next day scouring about 70 websites, including Instagram, Twitter, and sites that use geolocation to place people at the hotel, trying to identify who they might be and why they might have been meeting at the president’s hotel. Like a citizen journalist or activist deploying Google Maps and social media to identify weapons of war in Syria or Russian troop movements using only open source information.
But at this hotel, the targets are those who want to portray themselves as well connected or those that hope to be noticed by the administration.
“The obvious thing is to ingratiate themselves with the Trump Organization,” he said over a glass of Sazerac rye. “Maybe the president finds out about it, maybe he doesn’t, but it certainly isn’t going to hurt your standing.
[Related: Saudi government lobbyists spent $270K in 3 months at Trump’s luxury DC hotel]
“If you have concerns about the president of the United States owning a business, you get to see them right here and on Instagram every day,” he said
In March, he photographed Viorica Dăncilă, the Romanian prime minister, walking through the lobby.
Her stay, he said, could represent one of the foreign payments that critics of Trump find so troubling, even though the Trump Organization says it donates such payments to the U.S. government.
The questions deepened when Giuliani posted a photograph to Twitter of his legal team at dinner in the hotel. Months earlier he had written to anti-corruption officials in Romania warning them their work might jeopardize foreign investment.
“And over his shoulder is the prime minister of Romania,” said Everson.
“We don’t know if they spoke. But it seems pretty clear … if you are Rudy Giuliani and you have done work in Romania, you know who the person is behind you.”
Giuliani told the Washington Post he did the work as an individual and had been hired by an international consulting firm.
Publishing the photo, said Everson, was part of documenting the comings and goings, publicizing connections that other journalists might eventually be able to use in bigger stories.
“The approach that seems to work best is to cover everything,” he said. “Every data point matters.”
[Also read: GSA: Trump DC hotel not in violation of government lease]
