The U.S. Secret Service was forced to apologize to a Massachusetts salon owner after using her building’s bathroom without permission ahead of a fundraiser for Vice President Kamala Harris last week.
The salon owner, Alicia Powers, says Secret Service agents put duct tape over her security cameras and broke into her building by picking the lock. They then allowed various people to use the salon’s bathroom over a two-hour period.
Powers told Business Insider that she was aware she had to close her salon but was not informed about the Secret Service’s other plans.
“They had a bunch of people in and out of here doing a couple of bomb sweeps again – totally understand what they have to do, due to the nature of the situation,” Powers told Business Insider. “And at that point, my team felt like it was a little bit chaotic, and we just made the decision to close for Saturday.”
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Footage from the salon’s front-door Ring security camera shows a Secret Service agent approaching the door with a roll of tape and observing the locked door and the camera. The agent then grabbed a nearby chair and stood on it to tape over the security camera.
“There were several people in and out for about an hour-and-a-half – just using my bathroom, the alarms going off, using my counter, with no permission,” Powers told BI.
“And then when they were done using the bathroom for two hours, they left, and left my building completely unlocked, and did not take the tape off the camera,” she added.
Powers told the outlet that an EMS worker later told her the Secret Service agent in charge of security that day “was telling people to come in and use the bathroom.” The Secret Service told BI that its agents “would not” have used the building without permission, but they acknowledged that an agent had taped over the camera.
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“Whoever was visiting, whether it was a celebrity or not, I probably would’ve opened the door and made them coffee and brought in donuts to make it a great afternoon for them,” Powers told BI. “But they didn’t even have the audacity to ask for permission. They just helped themselves.”
The building’s landlord, Brian Smith, says no one gave the Secret Service officers permission to use the building or even enter it.
“Me and my dad own the building, and I have a crazy eccentric guy that lives upstairs,” Smith told BI. “And he didn’t tell the Secret Service they could use it, and I didn’t tell them, and my father didn’t tell them, and they had no permission to go in there whatsoever.”
Powers says a representative for the Secret Service’s Boston field office called her to apologize after BI contacted the agency about the incident.
“He said to me everything that was done was done very wrong,” Powers told the outlet. “They were not supposed to tape my camera without permission. They were not supposed to enter the building without permission.”
