BREAKING: Nancy Pelosi blames salon for letting her break coronavirus rules

"Let me just say this," she said, "I take responsibility for trusting the word of the neighbourhood salon that I've been to over the years many times and they said 'well we're able to accommodate people one person at a time and that we can set up that time,' I trusted that.

"As it turns out it was a set-up, so I take responsibility for falling for a set-up. That's all I'm going to say on that," she said.

This raised the question of how the Speaker of the House could be fooled by a hair stylist but ought be trusted with secrets concerning national security.

But reporters weren't done with questions about her salon treatment.

"I think that this salon owes me an apology," Pelosi said, "for setting up. But I will say this in fairness to him, and sympathetic to him, we have to get our country moving again. And I will not let this subject take away from the fact that we have 180,000 plus people who have died from this virus since we passed the bill, more than half those people have died since we passed the legislation.

"4.6 million have become infection since we passed the legislation. There are answers, there are scientific answers for this. 96 million, excuse me, 96,000 people have died since we passed the Heroes Act. So they want to jump on this. I think it's really important for us to pass the bill so we can address the virus and we can bring people back to work."

Pelosi was referring to an aid bill for COVID-19 relief. She said that she has been contacted by many people in the salon industry letting her know that they want to get back to work, and again stated her belief that she was set-up.

"Do you have any questions about people are dying and schools need to open and the rest?" People apparently did not.

"It was clearly a set-up," she said.

"There's more to this that I'm not going into of the motivation for a salon to say to me 'yes, come in' and then they go from there. It was clearly a set-up."

"I don't know where you all get your haircut or whatever it is," she said, "but we have a wealth of people who are engaged in these services and again the state and the city, depending on the incidents of infection in those areas, decide how they will function.

"If the salon is saying 'we're able to do this,' and they're not they should not have said that and they should not have been open for me to go there, but we trusted a neighbourhood salon that I've been to for years."

Pelosi's salon visit was captured on surveillance footage on Monday, and released by the salon owner. The salon, run by Erica Kious, has been unable to open since the lockdown began in March.

Pelosi's assistant reportedly contacted the salon and asked for an appointment with her usual stylist.