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The U.S. Secret Service is dropping hints that its agents were not behind a controversial break-in of a hair salon in Massachusetts during a campaign event last month for Vice President Kamala Harris.

The salon owner, Alicia Powers, alleged that Secret Service agents covered her security cameras with duct tape and broke into her building using lock-picking techniques, Fox News reports.

Security camera footage captured an individual dressed as a Secret Service agent approaching a door with a roll of tape. The alleged agent examined the locked door and camera before using a nearby chair to place tape over the camera.

“The U.S. Secret Service works closely with our partners in the business community to carry out our protective and investigative missions,” USSS spokeswoman Melissa McKenzie said in a statement, adding that the agency has been in contact with the salon owner, Powers, since the July 27 incident.

“We hold these relationships in the highest regard and our personnel would not enter, or instruct our partners to enter, a business without the owner’s permission,” McKenzie said, though she did not say who was responsible.

Powers told Business Insider that “several people” who were “in and out for about an hour-and-a-half – just using my bathroom, the alarms going off, using my counter, with no permission.”

“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 noted further.

Powers later stated that a representative from the USSS contacted her after Business Insider reached out to the agency for comment on the incident.

The incident follows an assassination attempt on former President Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, less than a month ago. The shooting has intensified scrutiny on the Secret Service, which was responsible for coordinating security with local law enforcement.

The scrutiny significantly increased after the revelation that law enforcement officers had observed the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, and flagged him as suspicious over an hour before the shooting, but subsequently lost track of him.

“After mounting pressure, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned, following heated testimony before the House Oversight Committee,” Fox added.

New video footage published over the weekend shows police in Butler, Pa., complaining that they warned the Secret Service of security issues before the assassination attempt.

“I f—ing told them that they needed to post guys f—ing over here…I told them that f—ing Tuesday,” a Butler Township police officer was heard saying in audio from his body-worn camera obtained by The Wall Street Journal. “I talked to the Secret Service guys. They’re like, ‘Yeah, no problem. We’re going to post guys over here.”

In one of the videos, obtained by The Journal, showed one officer talking about a suspicious person they lost who he described as “a gentleman with a flat face that we were looking for earlier. He was creeping people out.”

“He was watching people out in the woods by the water tower. I’m not sure he is the gentleman down or not,” he said.

Around 10 minutes after the shooting, another officer arrived on the scene and was noticeably frustrated.

“I thought you guys were on the roof. I thought it was you. I thought it was you,” the officer said.

“No,” another explained and explained that there were no officers on the roof.

“What the f—,” the officer responded. “Why were we not on the roof? Why weren’t we?”

The post Secret Service Responds To Claim Agents Broke Into Salon During Harris Event appeared first on Conservative Brief.