Report: Secret Service Broke Into Private Business While Protecting A Harris Fundraiser To Use The Toilet
After allowing former President Donald Trump to get shot in the head, the Secret Service took a new approach to security last week by breaking into private businesses while working Democrat campaign events to use the toilet.
Largely unnoticed until this weekend, a Business Insider report published last Wednesday revealed that the Secret Service purportedly broke into a Massachusetts hair salon while protecting a nearby Kamala Harris fundraiser to use its restrooms. The incident reportedly occurred on July 27, which is when the Democrat presidential nominee held her event at a nearby performing arts center.
According to the report, “The owner of the Four One Three Salon, Alicia Powers, told Business Insider that she closed her Pittsfield, Massachusetts, business that day at the request of the Secret Service, which examined the area earlier in the week.” Rather than grapple with the chaos caused by Harris’ visit, Powers and her team “made the decision to close” for the day.
While Powers wanted the doors to her business closed, the Secret Service seemingly did not. Security footage from the salon provided to Business Insider shows, as the outlet described, “a Secret Service agent — wearing a dark suit and open-collared white shirt, but no pin on her lapel — walked up to the salon’s front entrance while swinging a roll of masking tape in her left hand” at 8:10 a.m. the morning of the July 27 fundraiser.
After looking at the door and security camera, the agent left the venue before returning several minutes later. The footage shows the agent grabbing and standing on a chair from the porch to place tape “over the Ring security camera that had been watching her,” according to Business Insider.
Footage from a separate camera located inside the salon shows what appear to be Secret Service agents and security officials inside the facility later that afternoon. Powers said it looked like the door to the salon had been picked when she returned to the property later that day.
“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 the outlet. “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.”
The owner also claimed an EMS worker informed her the Secret Service official tasked with overseeing security for the Harris event “was telling people to come in and use the bathroom.”
While agency spokeswoman Melissa McKenzie asserted the Service “would not” do such a thing without the owner’s permission, Powers told Business Insider the head of the agency’s local field office later contacted her to apologize for the incident and offered to have the bathroom cleaned.
It’d have been nice if the Secret Service took the same level of action during Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, during which a gunman attempted to assassinate the GOP presidential candidate. Numerous details have emerged in the weeks since the assassination attempt documenting complete negligence by the agency.
In addition to leaving the rooftop used during the attempted assassination unsecured, law enforcement had identified Crooks — who was seen with a rangefinder — as a potential threat at least an hour before he fired on Trump. The Secret Service reportedly did not attend a security briefing conducted by local law enforcement the morning of the rally and did not originally plan to send snipers to the event to ensure Trump and attendees’ safety.
That briefing purportedly addressed potential drone use, which is significant given that Crooks was allegedly able to surveil the fairgrounds where the rally was held with a drone before Trump’s speech.
Such lapses don’t even include the fact that the Biden Department of Homeland Security denied the Trump security team’s repeated requests for additional personnel leading up to the assassination attempt.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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