Kamala Aide Under DOJ Investigation For Allegedly Falsifying Paperwork To Get Musk Buyout

A former top aide to Kamala Harris is now under criminal investigation, accused of forging paperwork to try to take advantage of Elon Musk’s “Fork in the Road” buyout offer, The Daily Wire has learned.

The probe is likely to explore whether high-level officials — potentially including Harris herself and Lina Khan, Joe Biden’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission — conspired to embed Nathaniel Segal into a job at the FTC just before Trump’s inauguration. The placement involved a series of maneuvers that appear to have been designed to evade personnel and ethics regulations, hide that Segal was a political appointee, and prevent the Trump administration from firing him.

Segal, who worked as a Deputy Domestic Policy Advisor to Harris when she was Vice President, was installed as Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the FTC on January 18, two days before Trump’s inauguration. He was placed on the payroll on direct orders of Khan despite the fact that he was missing essential paperwork about his career history, three Trump administration officials told The Daily Wire.

But as the scheme began to unravel in mid-February, Segal tried to pull the rip-cord by doctoring a document to try to secure the Deferred Resignation Program buyout, despite its deadline having passed and Segal not having received the offer in the first place, the officials said. The buyout program gives eligible employees benefits worth as much as $200,000 in exchange for leaving the government.

A Department of Justice official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the department received a criminal referral from the FTC outlining Segal’s alleged scheme. The official confirmed the department was taking a “broad” look at it. Segal did not return a request for comment.

Numerous apparent sleights of hand resulted in Segal being hired and classified as a tenured, non-political civil servant, which had the effect of making it harder for the Trump administration to fire him.

Beginning in May 2024, Segal worked as Deputy Domestic Policy Advisor to Harris in the legislative-branch office, where the vice president maintains as presiding officer of the Senate, according to Senate records.

But on January 7, 2025, after Harris lost the election, he was hired by the Executive Office of the President, where his title was Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Advisor to the Vice President. He was in that role for just 11 days before he was hired at the FTC.

The strange detour from the Senate — which seemingly would have required the involvement of multiple of Harris’ uppermost staff, if not the vice president herself — meant the FTC would have to get his personnel file, which is used to determine his hiring suitability and eligibility for various protections, from the Biden administration. But the Biden White House never sent it, despite numerous requests. Khan ordered him to be placed on the payroll anyway, and he was enrolled as a non-probationary employee, as if he was a longtime career employee transferring from another executive-branch agency, they said.

It wasn’t until after Trump took over that the FTC finally got a response from the Executive Office of the President, which said Segal was a political appointee and did not meet the criteria to be a tenured civil servant.

By then, it was becoming clear why Democrats seemed to go to lengths to make Segal a “non-probationary” employee. Trump ordered agencies to consider laying off probationary employees, since they have fewer job protections. Meanwhile, harder-to-get-rid-of tenured career employees could elect to resign in exchange for eight months’ pay and benefits, if they sent an email saying “Resign” by February 10.

On February 14, the FTC’s human resources department told Segal that it was classifying him as a new employee who needed to serve a one-year probationary period. Segal expressed concern that his job would no longer be safe, then suddenly claimed to have already accepted the buyout offer, which had closed four days prior, they said.

The Office of Personnel Management had no record of Segal accepting the buyout, so the FTC asked him for proof. He sent a screenshot purporting to show him emailing OPM on February 10 with the word “resign.” It asked him to forward the actual email, but he did not. The FTC determined that such an email was never sent from its servers, they said.

On February 26, Segal pressed the human resources department about the money. The human resources department set up a meeting with him about it for the next day. When Segal saw that a top lawyer for the agency was invited, he got squirrelly and resigned on the spot, they said.

According to his LinkedIn, Segal attended Yale, Harvard, and Stanford Graduate School of Business. Before working for Harris, Segal worked for the Obama White House “as a presidential appointee, working across the National Economic Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy as senior advisor to President Obama on issues of economics, technology, investing and finance,” according to Stanford. He also “held roles in the private sector at T. Rowe Price, Bain Capital, Eli Lilly, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs.”

At Yale, he majored in “history of medicine, ethnicity, race, and migration.” He serves on the board of Yale’s Alumni Association and “is a founding member of Native American Yale Alumni, chief financial officer of the Yale Latino Alumni Association, [and] a member of the AYA Diversity & Inclusion Task Force.”