Vice President Kamala Harris‘ Secret Service detail was caught on video committing crimes against a local business owner during a Harris campaign event late last month in Massachusetts, according to a report.
Alicia Powers, owner of Four One Three Salon in Pittsfield, said that she would have been more than happy to let the Secret Service use her business as a comfort station during Harris’ event in the city on Saturday July 27 if they had simply asked her permission.
“I’m the kind of person that would have set up coffee and doughnuts for them had they asked me for permission,” said Powers.
“Instead, they taped over a security camera on the back porch, broke into the salon, helped themselves to the bathroom, ate the mints on the counter and left without tidying up the bathroom or locking the back door on the way out,” according to The Berkshire Eagle, a local newspaper.
The Secret Service agents never contacted her or her landlord to ask permission to enter the building.
Powers had decided to close her business for the remainder of the day on the 27th because the agents were doing intense bomb sweeps in the area and things became “a little bit chaotic.”
The U.S. Secret Service is apologizing to a Massachusetts salon owner after an agent covered her security camera with duct tape and broke into her salon by picking the lock so that its bathroom could be used by various people for a two-hour period.
After the two-hour period,… pic.twitter.com/s4qSFtebn0
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 11, 2024
The Pittsfield Police Department has been supportive of her efforts to get accountability after what Harris’ agents did.
The Secret Service claims that they never would have entered the business if they were not given permission. Powers said that she did not give them permission and she feels violated, angry, and disrespected, the report said.
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“When they cleaned up and they left the tape on my camera and they left my back door completely unlocked,” she said. “What could have happened in that hour and a half or two hours that you guys left the building unlocked?”
Brian Smith, the building’s landlord, told Business Insider that he did not give the Secret Service permission to enter.
“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 had other cameras set up that alerted her that people were coming in and out of her business for two hours.
“From the communication I’ve heard from the EMS workers, somebody dressed in all black was telling them to come in and use the bathroom all afternoon,” she said.
When she spoke to the New York Secret Service office, she said that they denied their agents would act that way and then tried to guilt her into letting go of the issue.
“And he kind of ended the conversation with telling me, ‘Do you think we need to deal with this right now with what we have going on?’ And my response was, ‘Sir, I’m not trying to be rude but I don’t deserve to deal with this right now either,’” she said.
Powers told Business Insider that the head of the Secret Service’s Boston-based field office caller her and apologized after Business Insider published its report.
“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.”