The biggest single recipient of COVID-19 bailout loans is a hotel chain controlled by the Dallas billionaire Monty Bennett — his companies received $58 million in loans this month.

Last month, as the bailout package was being negotiated, Bennett's companies hired two Trump fundraisers as lobbyists, and Bennett made a $50,000 donation to Trump's joint fundraising committee.

Bennett is one of dozens of tycoons rushing to pay Trump-connected lobbyists for access as the government spreads billions of dollars in economic relief, a Business Insider analysis of lobbying-disclosure records found.

In addition to the loans, Bennett's companies benefited from new Department of Homeland Security guidance designating hotel workers as "essential."

The Dallas hotel magnate Monty Bennett was in trouble. The multibillion-dollar hotel conglomerate that he controls, walloped by the coronavirus pandemic, had laid off 95% of its workers and was behind on payments on $4 billion worth of debt.

So he did what other desperate companies have been doing in droves: He bought his way into Trump's world. While the economy is on lockdown, a coterie of lobbyists who boast of connections to the Trump White House are very much open for business.

Bennett's company Ashford Hotels Inc. and its affiliated subsidiaries had never hired a lobbyist in Washington before the COVID-19 crisis hit, according to lobbying databases. But in March, as Congress and the White House negotiated an unprecedented bailout package to salvage the economy, the company signed up a pair of Trump's key fundraisers, Jeff Miller and Roy Bailey, to lobby the White House and Treasury Department.

Within weeks, Bennett and his affiliated companies had become the largest beneficiaries of the Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records first reported by The Wall Street Journal. All told, Bennett's companies, which operate more than 128 hotels around the world under more than 20 brands, secured $58 million in bailout loans, more than Shake Shack and Ruth's Chris Steak House combined.

That's not bad when you consider that Bennett's companies paid out only $50,000 in lobbying fees.

However, in an apparent reversal, the Treasury Department demanded on Thursday afternoon that publicly traded companies—including three under Bennett's name—surrender the loaned funds by May 7, so that small businesses may access them.

"It is unlikely," the agency clarified, "that a public company with substantial market value and access to capital markets will be able to make the required certification in good faith."

Representatives for Bennett did not return multiple requests for comment emailed and left on voicemail. Miller did not return repeated requests for comment, including questions passed through an intermediary. An assistant to Bailey said she would pass the request to him, but he didn't reply.

Bennett wrote in a Medium post on March 17 that he was forced to lay off or furlough more than 6,000 employees. Of the federal aid, he told The Journal, "75% or more of the proceeds will be used to bring our employees back to work with the balance to be used to pay utilities, rent, and debt service to lenders."

Trump megadonor hires Trump lobbyists to bail out his company

Bennett himself is a prolific donor, having given more than $1.1 million to Trump and the Republican Party since the 2016 campaign cycle, according to Federal Election Commission records. On March 7, as talks of a massive federal bailout began to take shape, Bennett gave $50,000 to the Trump campaign's main fundraising committee, Trump Victory.

According to lobbying disclosures, Miller and Bailey, the former Trump fundraisers that Ashford hired, both attempted to influence Treasury Department officials on the company's behalf. The secretary of that agency, Steven Mnuchin, was not only the chief White House negotiator on the bailout bills but also the ringmaster of Trump's fundraising effort in 2016. He also has longstanding relationships with many of the donors still active in Trump's reelection effort.

The same month he hired Miller and Bailey, Bennett publicly urged the White House to bail out his industry in a series of posts on Medium. A March 22 post called "What's wrong with America?" bemoaned the timidity of politicians who hesitate to hand taxpayer dollars to struggling companies without assurances that they wouldn't simply line shareholders' pockets.

"Politicians are so terrified from appearing to help big businesses or companies that somehow make a profit that they put restrictions on aid that are onerous and counterproductive — sometimes even rendering the aid unusable," Bennett wrote. "We should not be disqualified from assistance because we built our previously small businesses into bigger businesses. That's how we manage to put more Americans to work."

The Paycheck Protection Program has formed the core of the Trump administration's attempts to protect the economy from the impact of social distancing. The program, which provides low-interest loans that will be forgiven if they're used to hire back laid-off workers, was designed to save small businesses from going under. The national burger and fry chain Shake Shack was pressured earlier this week to return the $10 million it received from the program.

Despite his ownership of a massive chain of hotels, Bennett said in his Medium posts that each hotel was itself a small business deserving federal assistance.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Bennett's companies continued to pay millions of dollars in dividends to preferred shareholders, including himself and his father, through March. The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, just as US states witnessed a fresh wave of new cases and millions of Americans began filing for unemployment.

A Treasury Department spokesman said Wednesday that loans are reviewed by individual loan processors at banks, not the department. He added that the loans are forgiven only if they are used to keep employees on payroll and pointed to Mnuchin's comments on Fox Business this week that large companies which take advantage of the program "could be subject to investigation."

The spokesman declined to answer when asked whether Miller and Bailey's lobbying of the department had any influence.

A White House spokesman deferred questions to the Small Business Administration, which administers the Paycheck Protection Program. A spokeswoman for the SBA said banks and lenders file with their office, make the loans, and then the SBA backs the loans on a first-come, first-served basis. The spokeswoman said it's an automated process.

Questions to the Trump campaign were not immediately returned.

'They're printing money,' one lobbyist said

A Business Insider review of lobbying-disclosure records and interviews with Republican sources have identified more than a dozen lobbyists with Trump ties who have signed up new clients or repurposed past relationships to help clients deal with COVID-19 and its continuing economic toll.

Ride-sharing and scooter companies, laundromats, gyms, and high-end pharmaceutical companies all found themselves suddenly and urgently in need of a line into the Trump administration. And they secured it through a slew of top fundraisers, campaign operatives, and former Trump aides offering their services as guides to Washington during the coronavirus pandemic — for a price, of course.

Chief among them are Miller's firm, Miller Strategies, and Ballard Partners, which is led by Brian Ballard, a veteran Florida lobbyist. They also include former top staffers who worked directly with the senior administration officials who are now deciding the fates of industries struggling to ride out the pandemic.

"Washington is a maze; it's a labyrinth, and many times clients need assistance when their businesses and their employees are hurting to navigate that maze," Justin Sayfie, a partner at Ballard Partners, said. "So knowing which door to knock on is something we help our clients with."

Demand for such expertise and connections is especially high as the US government response rapidly oscillates. On Friday, for example, the Department of Homeland Security issued new guidelines for which industries it considered essential to the country's operation through the pandemic — creating instant winners and losers for Trump-connected clients.

Ballard and Miller charge upward of $300,000 to $400,000 a year for the access and influence they can provide. "They're printing money," one veteran Republican lobbyist said.

Clients have much to lose, and much to gain, from the pandemic

Ballard and Miller are hardly known outside the Beltway, but they both boast deep ties to the ever-shifting whirlwind of characters that blew into Washington, DC, with Trump's shocking electoral victory. Ballard comes out of Florida politics, where he led Trump's statewide fundraising effort, and he has signed up a team of Trump-linked people, including former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who helped lead Trump's public defense in the impeachment trial.

As the threat of the coronavirus became clear about a month ago, Ballard started signing up new clients, records showed, including Getaround Inc., a Silicon Valley ride-sharing company; Bird, a scooter company that suffered through layoffs; and NanoPure, a chemical company that promises deep disinfecting of office spaces. They all had much to lose, or gain, from the pandemic.

Miller, the top political adviser to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, is the vice finance chair of the 2020 Republican National Convention and a top fundraiser for Trump's reelection effort. In addition to Bennett's companies, his firm has signed up the California Business Roundtable, which represents midsize businesses facing existential threats; the airplane charter company iAero Group; and Nuclein LLC, a company the provides rapid testing for infectious diseases.

Miller did not respond to a request for comment.

And as Mnuchin emerged as Trump's quarterback for the ongoing economic rescue, negotiating trillions of dollars in stimulus spending with Congress, lobbyists with ties to him also booked new clients: Mnuchin's former director of legislative affairs Brad Bailey represented the American Investment Council; Matthew Kellogg, a former Treasury deputy assistant for legislative affairs, represented the global bank HSBC; and Jared Sawyer, a former Treasury deputy assistant secretary for financial policy, worked for the Bank of New York Mellon Corp.

The fight for what is deemed 'essential' work

All of that lobbying is starting to pay off.

On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security released updated guidance detailing which industries the federal government considers "critical" enough to remain open through the pandemic. The update included a couple of major changes desired by Trump-connected lobbying clients.

In one example, the department swapped out the word "employees" in previous guidance for the word "workers," according to a document circulated in Washington's lobbying community showing changes from the last update to the guidance, which was issued at the end of March.

The change was a win for ride-sharing companies and gig workers who'd been left in the cold when the coronavirus first started to cause US illnesses and wreak havoc on the country's economy.

That was good news for the likes of Getaround Inc., the 10-year-old ride-sharing company headquartered in San Francisco that had signed up Ballard, Trump's Florida campaign chairman, to lobby on its behalf.

Bennett's Ashford Hotels could also claim a victory from a sentence inserted into the new DHS guidance that deemed hotels "essential" to provide services to first responders and healthcare workers.

When he was asked about the changes in the DHS guidelines, a DHS spokesman pointed to the press release issued on Friday, which said DHS had received "feedback" but did not specify where that feedback came from.

A White House spokesman did not return multiple requests for comment from Business Insider. Nor did a spokesman for the Trump campaign.

An ethics expert said it has 'the appearance of corruption and cronyism'

Virginia Canter, the former chief ethics counsel for President Barack Obama, said the proliferation of former Trump White House aides and campaign operatives signing up bailout clients reeks of the very "swampiness" Trump campaigned against.

"It gives the appearance of corruption and cronyism," said Canter, who now serves as the chief ethics counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a DC watchdog group.

Sayfie, a lobbyist working at Ballard Partners, told Business Insider in an interview that watchdogs and journalists often ignore what he regards as noble lobbying, citing his firm's representation of local hospital systems, such as Broward Health in South Florida, that serve the poor and uninsured.

"They're bleeding losses; they're preparing for a surge that isn't going to come," he said. "How much money did these hospitals lose preparing for these storms that didn't come?" Sayfie said. "Who's going to make good on that?"

Sayfie denied that Ballard's lobbyists trade on Trump's name or promise special access to his officials when he was asked whether the fundraising Ballard does for Trump gives the firm special access.

"We never publicly or privately discuss people's relationships with any public official. That's not how we operate; it's not part of our vocabulary," Sayfie said.

The Ballard Partners website, however, prominently touts its partners' relationships with Trump and his campaign. Ballard's biography says his "political portfolio includes significant roles in presidential campaigns including the historic election of President Donald J. Trump."

Sayfie's biography recounts his connections to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former President George W. Bush, and former Sen. Mel Martinez. It also says that he "was appointed by President Donald J. Trump to serve as a Commissioner on the President's Commission on White House Fellowship."

With reporting by Angela Wang.