In a stunning revelation that underscores President Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to root out government waste and corruption, a former aide to Kamala Harris, Nathaniel Segal, finds himself at the center of a criminal investigation. 

The probe, initiated under Trump’s watch, accuses Segal of falsifying documents in a desperate bid to cash in on Elon Musk’s innovative “Fork in the Road” buyout program—a move that could have netted him up to $200,000 in taxpayer-funded benefits. 

This unfolding scandal not only highlights Trump’s commitment to rooting out government corruption but also casts a damning shadow over Harris and her inner circle, raising serious questions about their ethical conduct during the waning days of the Biden administration.

Segal, who served as Harris’s Deputy Domestic Policy Advisor, was strategically placed as Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on January 18, 2025—just two days before Trump’s triumphant inauguration. Sources within the Trump administration allege that this last-minute appointment, orchestrated under the direction of FTC Chair Lina Khan—a Biden appointee—may have been a calculated effort to shield Segal from Trump’s personnel reforms. 

By embedding him as a supposedly tenured civil servant, Harris and her allies allegedly sought to protect Segal from the accountability measures Trump promised to bring to Washington. However, the scheme quickly collapsed under the scrutiny of Trump’s diligent officials.

The “Fork in the Road” initiative, backed by Musk and embraced by Trump, offers federal employees a generous exit package to streamline government efficiency—a hallmark of Trump’s vision for a leaner, more effective bureaucracy. 

Yet, Segal, ineligible for the program due to his status as a political appointee, allegedly resorted to forgery when his job security was threatened. After missing the February 10 deadline to opt into the buyout, Segal reportedly fabricated an email claiming he had resigned in time, a deception exposed when the FTC confirmed no such correspondence existed. 

“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,” The Daily Wire wrote. 

Further investigation reveals a troubling pattern of maneuvering that implicates Harris and Khan directly. Before his FTC role, Segal briefly held a position in the Executive Office of the President from January 7 to January 18, 2025, following Harris’s electoral defeat. This 11-day stint, seemingly a bureaucratic detour, allowed his personnel file to remain under Biden administration control, delaying its transfer to the FTC. Despite lacking essential documentation, Khan ordered Segal onto the payroll as a non-probationary employee—a status that would have made him harder to remove under Trump’s directive to review probationary staff. Only after Trump’s team demanded clarity did the truth emerge: Segal was a political operative, not a career civil servant, ineligible for the protections he sought.

The Department of Justice, now invigorated under Trump’s leadership, has taken a “broad” approach to the investigation, according to an anonymous official cited by The Daily Wire. This suggests that the probe may extend beyond Segal to examine whether Harris or Khan played active roles in this apparent conspiracy. 

As reported by Fox News on March 6,  the investigation’s scope could expand to other high-level Democrats.