It was worse than a bad hair day.
Secret Service agents taped a security camera and entered a hair salon in Massachusetts while securing the area for a Kamala Harris campaign event, according to the salon’s owner.
The intervention occurred on July 27, prior to Vice President Harris’ first fundraiser since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Four One Three Salon owner Alicia Powers told Business Insider that she closed her business in Pittsfield, Massachusetts that day at the request of the Secret Service, which canvassed the area earlier in the week. The lounge is located behind the Colonial Theatre, a performing arts space in the Berkshires, where Harris spoke.
“They had a bunch of people in and out here doing some bomb sweeps again — they fully understood what they had to do, because of the nature of the situation,” Powers told Business Insider. “And at that point, my team felt like it was a little chaotic, and we just made the decision to shut it down for Saturday.”
A Secret Service spokesperson told Business Insider that agency employees “would not enter” without the business owner’s permission, but acknowledged that an agent was recorded on the security camera lens.
At 8:10 a.m. that Saturday, a Secret Service agent—dressed in a dark suit and white open-collared shirt, but without a pin in her jacket—walked up to the salon’s front entrance. while waving a roll of masking tape in his left hand. She looked out the door. She then looked at the security camera on the porch. Then she looked at the door again.
She left. When she returned two minutes later, she grabbed a chair from the porch, stood on it, and recorded the Ring security camera that had seen her.
(Business Insider blurred the face of a Secret Service agent in the video below.)
The door was closed. But later that afternoon, another security camera, pointed at the door from inside the building, spotted four more people over nearly two hours.
Two people wearing EMS uniforms and one person in camouflage law enforcement uniforms entered. The fourth person, wearing a dark suit and white shirt like a Secret Service officer, stood by the door.
The salon’s security alarm went off the entire time. Security footage from the two cameras, which Powers shared with BI, does not show anyone letting people in.
“There were several people in and out for about an hour and a half — just using my bathroom, the alarms went off, using my counter, without permission,” Powers said.
“And then when they were done using the bathroom for two hours, they left and left my building completely unlocked, and they didn’t take the tape off the camera,” she continued.
Powers told BI that an EMS worker later told her that the Secret Service agent in charge of security that day “was telling people to come in and use the bathroom.”
BI asked Secret Service spokeswoman Melissa McKenzie if the agency invites other people to use the bathroom. She told BI that agency workers “would not tell” someone to enter the salon without the owner’s permission.
When Powers returned to the property later that day, she found the door lock appeared to have been picked, she told BI.
The people who entered the Four One Three Salon didn’t do much damage other than leaving behind a messy bathroom, Powers said.
But what bothered her was what she saw as a complete disregard for her business, trespassing and leaving the place open when they left, she said.
Powers said she felt “violated.”
“Whoever was visiting, whether they were a celebrity or not, I’d be sure to open the door, make them coffee and bring them donuts to make it a great afternoon for ta,” she told BI. “But they didn’t have the guts to ask permission. They just helped themselves.”
Brian Smith, the building’s owner, said he did not give the Secret Service permission to use the property.
“Me and my dad own the building and I have a crazy eccentric son who 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 dad didn’t tell them, and they had no permission to go in there.”
The Secret Service apologized after the BI reached out
A day after the BI initially reached out to the Secret Service for comment for this story — more than a week after it went into business — an agency spokesman said it had “communicated” with Powers.
“The US Secret Service works closely with our partners in the business community to carry out our protective and investigative missions,” McKenzie wrote in an email to BI. “The Secret Service has since communicated with the owner of the affected business.”
“We hold these relationships in the highest regard and our personnel would not enter, or direct our partners to enter, a business without the owner’s permission,” she added.
Bill Pickle, a former Secret Service special agent who previously oversaw training for the agency, told Business Insider that it’s conceivable why a member of the Secret Service would tape over a security camera lens.
Pickle speculated that someone from the agency’s technical services division — which deals with explosives, wiretapping, wiring and other physical security risks — may have wanted to limit visibility of Harris’ location if the vice president entered the camera’s view. .
But invading the property to use the bathroom “sounds weird,” Pickle told BI.
“We just don’t go in and grab it,” Pickle said. “The only time you do that is if it’s a crime scene or if there’s a real threat.”
Powers said she contacted a local Secret Service office after the incident and that a person there told her to ask the local police, who said they didn’t know anything about it.
“I know for a fact that none of our members were involved in this,” Pittsfield Police Capt. Matthew Hill told BI.
On Thursday morning — a day after the BI reached out to the agency for comment — the head of the Secret Service’s Boston-based field office called Powers to apologize, she said.
“He told me that everything that was done was done very wrong,” Powers said. “They shouldn’t have been recording my camera without permission. They shouldn’t have been entering the building without permission.”
Powers said the Secret Service representative she spoke with offered to clean the salon and pay her alarm company’s 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 of how this could have been destroyed with the slightest wrong move.” , she said.