The Secret Service has apologized to a salon owner in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, because agents broke into the business during a campaign event for Kamala Harris.
Alicia Powers, owner of the Four One Three Salon, told Business Insider that agents broke in on July 27.
The disturbing revelation about the rogue agents comes after the agency’s embarrassing performance two weeks before, when it failed to stop the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
The Break-In
Powers explained that the agents were “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.” So she closed the salon that Saturday.
A salon camera caught the agents red-handed. At 8:10 a.m., a diversity, equity, and inclusion agent took a chair from the porch, set it up below the camera, stood on it, then taped over the lens.
Later video from a camera inside the store revealed even more. It shows two emergency medical services personnel and cop and an agent. One of the EMS workers grabbed what appears to be candy off the counter while the other laughed.
Audio shows that the business’ alarm sounded.
“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.
Powers also told the website that an EMS worker said the agent in charge “was telling people to come in and use the bathroom.” The lock on the door appeared to have been picked.
“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.”
An agent might tape over a camera so it doesn’t record Harris and reveal her whereabouts, a former agent told the website. But “we just don’t go in and take place or seize it” unless it presents a threat or a crime has been committed.
Calling the salon one of its “partners in the business community,” a spokeswoman told BI that ”our personnel would not enter, or instruct our partners to enter, a business without the owner’s permission.”
Nevertheless, the top agent in Secret Service’s Boston office apologized, Powers told the website:
“He said to me everything that was done was done very wrong,” Powers said. “They were not supposed to tape my camera without permission. They were not supposed to enter the building without permission.”
Powers said the Secret Service representative she spoke to offered to have the salon cleaned and pay her alarm company bill for the day. Powers said he also offered to visit and apologize in person over a cup of coffee.
Powers said she’d take him up on it.
“I want him to see the salon, and I want him to see what I do for the community, and be in this space, and have an understanding as to how this could have been ruined with the slightest wrong move,” she said.
Second Black Eye
That breaking and entering, though, isn’t quite as embarrassing as the agency’s inexplicable failure to protect Donald Trump at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania two weeks earlier.
One revelation after another pounded the once highly respected agency’s sterling reputation. One of the most shocking was then-Director Kimberly Cheatle’s ridiculous explanation for the decision not to post agents or local police on the roof from which Thomas Matthew Crooks fired at Trump.
“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point,” Cheatle told ABC News:
And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.
Video of Crooks in a dash across the roof to get into position disproved the widely ridiculed explanation.
Another embarrassment was the exposure of Cheatle’s focus on hiring women agents. Video of the assassination attempt showed a woman agent who could not holster her pistol. Another danced about, seemingly clueless, while a third fiddled with her sunglasses and adjusted her coat.
Cheatle resigned after a disastrous appearance before the House Oversight Committee.
The Washington Post published another damaging report. The agency repeatedly turned down requests from Trump’s team for more security and exposed him to a similarly dangerous environment at a rally in South Carolina.
As well, GOP Senator Charles Grassley released texts and photos from local police. They showed that cops exchanged photos of Crooks at 5:38 p.m., and a cop spotted him at a picnic table at 4:27 p.m.
GOP Representative Josh Hawley of Missouri revealed information from whistleblowers: Most the agents on Trump’s detail were not Secret Service, but instead those from Homeland Security Investigations.
Secret Service agents encountered Crooks three hours before the assassination when he entered the site with a golf rangefinder, CNN revealed. Even worse, the network reported, countersnipers spotted Crooks as he looked at them through his rangefinder. “They were looking at him while he was looking at them,” a top law enforcement officials told the network.
The bullet from Crooks’s AR-15 grazed Trump’s ear. Crooks murdered firefighter Corey Comperatore, and wounded David Dutch and James Copenhaver. In a strange twist, Copenhaver shot the video of Crooks’s running across the roof that was too steep for agents.
