A U.S. Secret Service agent offered an apology to a salon owner in Massachusetts after agents were accused of using the bathroom inside her business without permission while preparing for Vice President Kamala Harris’ visit last week, according to reports.
Salon owner Alicia Powers said Secret Service agents taped over her security cameras and bypassed their locked front door to gain entry. They let various people use the salon’s bathroom in a span of two hours.
Powers told Business Insider she knew she needed to shut her salon for the occasion but was not informed of what else Secret Service officials would be doing.
“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.”
Video from the salon’s front-door ring camera shows a man who appears to be at least partially hidden behind bushes approaching with what looks like a roll of tape. When he saw the locked door and camera, the agent picked up a chair that was by him, placed it in front of his face where there was no room divider to block view from outside and then taped over at least one 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.
The EMS worker also told Powers that the Secret Service agent for security during that day was “telling people to come in and use the bathroom.”
The reporter took that to mean there was no way the Secret Service agents would have been in the building without asking permission, yet one had covered his/her body camera with tape.
“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.”
Neither the landlord Brian Smith nor his father Bob Johnson, who also lives there, asked or gave the Secret Service authority to be in that building.
“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.”
A spokesman for the Boston field office of the Secret Service called to apologize, after Business Insider contacted division headquarters.
“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.”
