White House Aide Bet $100K on Trump’s Speeches, Probe Finds
A White House teleprompter operator has been placed on unpaid leave after allegedly using his advance access to President Donald Trump’s prepared remarks to place winning bets worth more than $100,000 on the prediction market Kalshi, according to federal investigators and sources familiar with the probe.
Gabriel Perez, a deputy assistant to the president who has operated Trump’s teleprompter since 2016, is in settlement negotiations with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over allegations that he exploited his inside knowledge of the president’s speeches to profit on Kalshi’s “mention markets” — where users wager on whether specific words, phrases, or topics will appear in a speaker’s public remarks, as NPR reported.
How the Scheme Worked
According to sources cited by ABC News, which first broke the story, Perez placed bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period. The bets included wagers on the February State of the Union address, a December primetime address, a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Trump’s March Medal of Honor ceremony remarks.
Kalshi’s surveillance systems detected unusual betting patterns on Perez’s account and traced it to a federal employee operating White House teleprompters. The company froze approximately $90,000 before it could be withdrawn and referred the case to the CFTC.
“Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC after an exchange investigation,” Robert DeNault, Kalshi’s head of enforcement, said in a statement. “We have been assisting regulators on this matter and provided evidence we collected, as we do in any referral.”
White House Response
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Perez has been placed on unpaid administrative leave. She said President Trump was informed of the situation and called it “deeply unfortunate and, frankly, a disgrace.”
“The White House has extremely strict ethical guidelines with respect to issues like this,” Leavitt told reporters, as The Guardian reported.
Perez, who earned an annual salary of $175,000 as a deputy assistant to the president, has been “fully cooperative” with the CFTC and sat for an interview with regulators in recent months, acknowledging some of the trades, sources said. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan were alerted to the case but declined to open a criminal investigation.
A First for the White House
This case marks the first known instance of a White House staffer being investigated for insider trading on prediction markets. It comes amid a broader crackdown on such activity. In recent months, the Department of Justice brought its first two insider trading cases involving prediction markets: a U.S. Army special forces soldier charged with making $400,000 on Polymarket using classified information about the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and a Google software engineer charged with using confidential company data to make $1.2 million on the same platform.
In March, the White House issued an internal memo — reviewed by NPR — warning staff against using nonpublic government information to place bets on Kalshi and Polymarket. The memo stated that doing so is a criminal offense and “will not be tolerated.”
The Broader Picture
The case has reignited debate over the regulation of prediction markets, which have exploded in growth in recent months. Ahead of Trump’s July 16 address, Kalshi traders had wagered more than $800,000 on mention markets alone. The CFTC, under Trump-appointed Chair Michael Selig, has taken a mostly hands-off approach, but critics argue that “mention markets” are inherently susceptible to insider trading by anyone with advance access to speech content.
Trump has occasionally criticized prediction markets but said in April that he supports them because the United States could be “left out in the cold” if it does not allow companies like Kalshi and Polymarket to operate.
Late-Night Comedy Seizes the Story
The unusual nature of the allegations has also drawn widespread mockery from late-night comedians. Seth Meyers joked on his show: “Everybody’s getting their grift on in the Trump White House, baby! Can you believe that?” Michael Kosta of The Daily Show added: “Honestly, respect. You know what I’m saying? Oh, I know people are going say it’s cheating if he knows what words are in the prompter, but with Trump, that’s not a sure thing,” as USA Today reported.
What’s Next
Perez is expected to reach a civil settlement with the CFTC involving disgorgement of profits and a ban from trading. The string of insider trading cases — involving the soldier, the Google employee, former congressman George Santos, and now Perez — may accelerate congressional efforts to pass legislation regulating prediction markets.
For now, the case serves as a stark reminder of the ethical vulnerabilities that arise when White House staff with access to sensitive information operate in the largely unregulated world of prediction markets — a world that, as Trump himself acknowledged, “has become somewhat of a casino.”
Reporting contributed by ABC News, NPR, The Guardian, BBC News, and USA Today.