Trump’s Teleprompter Operator Faces a CFTC Probe Over His Kalshi Bets

Gabriel Perez has run Donald Trump’s teleprompter since the 2016 campaign. Federal investigators now say he also bet on which words would come out of it, and won more than $100,000 before Kalshi froze the profits and called in regulators.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC, the federal agency that regulates derivatives and prediction markets) is negotiating a settlement with Perez, and federal prosecutors in Manhattan have already passed on filing criminal charges. That outcome sits oddly next to two other prediction market cases this year that did end in criminal counts.

A Bet Placed Mid-Sentence

Perez holds the formal title of deputy assistant to the president and technical advisor, and drew a $175,000 salary in 2026, according to a financial disclosure reviewed by CNN. He has flown on Trump Force One and become, in the president’s own telling, indispensable.

“I have a guy, Gabe. He’s excellent. I’ve had some real bad ones, but I have Gabe,” Trump said of Perez at a 2024 campaign stop in Reno, Nevada.

The CFTC found that Perez placed wagers on more than a dozen of Trump’s speeches over a three-month stretch, including the February State of the Union address, a December primetime speech, a January address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and March remarks at a Medal of Honor ceremony. Investigators also found he adjusted positions mid-speech, closing out bets whenever Trump skipped over a word from his prepared remarks, according to ABC News’s original reporting on the case.

That detail matters given Trump’s own description of himself. “You know, when you go up here, you take a big chance, especially me because I go off teleprompter about 80% of the time,” he told the Detroit Economic Club in January, one of the addresses investigators believe Perez traded around.

Kalshi’s account of the discovery is blunt.

Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC after an exchange investigation.

Robert DeNault, Kalshi’s head of enforcement, said that in a statement sent to CNBC, Axios and several other outlets Thursday. He added that the company has been “assisting regulators on this matter” and turned over everything it collected. Kalshi’s own tally puts total winnings above $100,000, of which the exchange managed to freeze roughly $90,000 before it could be withdrawn.

What Exactly Is a Kalshi Mention Market?

A mention market is a contract on whether a specific word, phrase or topic gets said during a scheduled speech, broadcast or event. Traders buy “yes” or “no” positions, and the price swings in real time as a speaker talks, which is exactly the mechanism regulators say Perez exploited.

• Mention market – a Kalshi contract that pays out based on whether a named word or phrase is spoken during a specific address, with odds moving second by second as the event unfolds.

These are volatile by design. Trump’s tendency to wander off script makes the odds on his speeches swing hard, and some traders have gone as far as installing television antennas to shave a fraction of a second off their reaction time during live events, NPR has reported. A market this jumpy is also, on paper, the hardest kind for an insider to game, since nobody can be certain what actually gets said. Perez appears to have solved that problem simply by watching the delivery himself and trading against it in real time.

Kalshi Blocks Candidates and Athletes, Not White House Aides

Kalshi already screens for several categories of people it considers insider risks. Its published framework for stopping insider trading lays out who gets blocked before a trade is even placed.

• Political insiders – candidates, members of Congress, campaign staff, election officials and poll workers are barred from markets tied to their own races.
• Sports insiders – athletes, coaches, referees and team or league personnel are screened in partnership with the NHL and the integrity firm IC360.
• Disqualified persons – certain felons, people under CFTC disqualification and sanctioned individuals are barred outright.

Nowhere on that list is a category for White House staff who see a president’s remarks before he delivers them. Perez wasn’t a candidate, a campaign staffer or an athlete, so nothing in Kalshi’s proactive screening would have stopped him from opening an account. He was only caught because his trading pattern itself looked wrong. Kalshi’s surveillance flagged the activity in March after it failed to match typical buying and selling patterns, and separate tips came in through the company’s whistleblower channel before analysts traced the account back to a federal employee working as a teleprompter operator.

Kalshi is fighting versions of this same question in courtrooms and statehouses at once. A federal judge recently delivered an unfavorable decision in the New York prediction markets case before Judge Torres, and Nevada is separately pursuing a lawsuit seeking to halt its sports contracts. Neither case is about Perez, but both show regulators testing the exchange’s compliance systems from angles its own rulebook doesn’t fully anticipate.

One Bet Settles, Another Gets Charged

Perez’s case is the third major prediction market insider trading story this year, and the contrast in outcomes is stark enough to lay out side by side.

Van Dyke, an Army Special Forces master sergeant who helped plan the raid that captured former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, was criminally charged in April. Spagnuolo, a Google engineer, was charged with fraud in May over bets tied to internal “Year in Search” data. Perez, with arguably the most direct access to nonpublic information of any of them, is instead in talks to give back his winnings and walk away.

CFTC Chairman Michael Selig has described his agency as a “cop on the beat” watching these markets, telling ABC News that anyone attempting insider trading or manipulation would be found and face legal action. Yet by his own account the CFTC has brought only one enforcement action all year, the civil suit against Van Dyke, even as it tells the public it has subpoenas out and cases in the pipeline. The House Oversight Committee, led by Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, opened its own review of how Kalshi and Polymarket police themselves after the Van Dyke indictment, and both companies gave closed-door briefings to the committee in June.

Someone Else Paid for This

Kalshi’s chief executive, Tarek Mansour, has argued publicly that insider trading is a bigger problem on Wall Street than on his own platform, because stock market abuse draws on pension funds and index holdings spread across millions of passive investors. Event contracts work differently. “The stock market is hard because you may have a piece of information, like a certain product is going to be released, and then you buy the stock. It’s very broad,” Mansour told lawyer Max Raskin in an interview published by the Washington Post.

What Mansour’s framing leaves out is that on Kalshi, the money moving between active participants is exactly the point. Every dollar Perez won on a mention market came directly from whoever held the opposite side of that same contract, not from a diffuse pool of shareholders. A Roosevelt Institute analysis of Kalshi’s trading data found that ordinary users of the platform have lost more than half a billion dollars since it launched in July 2021, with profits concentrated among a small slice of sophisticated traders.

• $500 million plus – losses run up by ordinary Kalshi users since the platform’s 2021 launch, per the Roosevelt Institute’s analysis.
• 150+ – insider trading investigations Kalshi says it opened in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
• 100+ – potential insider trades the company says it blocked over that same quarter.
• 20+ – cases Kalshi referred to law enforcement in that period.

Those numbers describe a system working roughly as designed against outsiders trying to game outcomes with public information. Perez’s case is different because his information was never public in the first place, and the only reason he got caught is that his own trading pattern gave him away.

What Happens to Perez Now?

The CFTC has discussed settlement terms that would require Perez to surrender his profits and agree to stop making similar trades, according to sources who spoke to ABC News. He has acknowledged some of the trades in an interview with regulators and is described by the White House as fully cooperating. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters Trump called the situation “deeply unfortunate and, frankly, a disgrace” and personally decided to place Perez on unpaid administrative leave.

“So, there will be a teleprompter operator tonight, of course, but it will not be the one, unfortunately,” Leavitt said.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle added that “the White House has strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow,” while a CFTC spokesperson said only that the commission “can’t confirm or deny an investigation.” Kalshi has spent recent months trying to close gaps like this one before the next case forces the issue. In June it rolled out a market-by-market risk-scoring system alongside employment verification for high-risk contracts, the same month the CFTC floated its own proposed rule to determine which event contracts count against the public interest. The exchange has also been under scrutiny from Congress itself, after campaign staffers were caught betting on their own races despite new safeguards meant to stop exactly that.

None of those fixes were built with a teleprompter operator in mind. Europe settled a version of this argument years earlier and simply closed the door: the bloc’s 2018 binary options ban from securities regulator ESMA already prohibits the kind of retail event contract Kalshi built its business on, which is one reason this entire category of scandal has no real equivalent on the other side of the Atlantic.

By Thursday evening, before Trump’s address to the nation on election integrity even began, Kalshi traders had already piled more than $800,000 into bets on whether he would say words like “Hormuz,” “rigged election” or “fake news.” The market that got his teleprompter operator suspended was still open for business, running the same night he lost his job over it.