White House Correspondents Insider

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Hollywood Reporter: Inside the WHC Garden Brunch: Lindsay Lohan, Greta Van Susteren and John Coale

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Garden Brunch Guests: Shawn Chapman, John Coale, Greta Van Susteren, Kris Jenner and Lindsay Lohan

“While their evenings consisted of boozy, black tie affairs, the celebrity circuit that invaded Washington DC this past weekend was far from nocturnal. In between two nights of clanking glasses at done-up hotels and restaurants (including THR and Google’s Friday night party), the big players took advantage of the warm weather to celebrate each other in the garden, too.

The 19th annual White House Correspondents’ Association Garden Brunch was held on Saturday and held plenty of star-studded highlights. The party’s organizer, Tammy Haddad, reflected on the afternoon in an email discussion with The Hollywood Reporter.

As was the case for most of the weekend, Lindsay Lohan, a guest of Fox News, drew major attention. But it was all tranquility for Lilo this time. The star met with top level officials in the Obama campaign, such as David Axelrod and former Obama “body man” Reggie Love. Lohan reminsced with Fox News’ Ed Henry about growing up in Long Island, New York, and told the son of Tammy Haddad, one of the event’s organizers, that she still had the car from Herbie Fully Loaded in her garage (the young man was excited to meet her because he had seen the movie about 100 times).

Woody Harrelson appeared with Steve Schmidt, the GOP adviser that he played in HBO’s Game Change (the pair appeared together at THR and Google’s party the night before); Harrelson wowed onlookers with card tricks, having casually produced an entire deck from his pocket. Kerry Washington, who plays a DC spinmeister in ABC’s Scandal, also got kudos for her beltway portrayal.

California’s top two leaders, Gov. Jerry Brown and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, couldn’t have been more different; Brown declined to speak to the press, while Newsom, who now has his own show on Current TV, took any and all questions.

Meanwhile, Elle Macpherson showed MSNBC host Willie Geist that all the talk television experience in the world couldn’t give him the type of attention-grabbing abilities that she has; while he couldn’t quiet the crowd, they almost immediately fell silent when the supermodel called for them to pipe down.”