He Ran the White House Teleprompter and Bet on Which Words Trump Would Say. The CFTC Says That Cost Him $172,000.
Gabriel Perez had the speeches before the president delivered them. Kalshi's own surveillance system caught the pattern, froze more than $90,000 in his account, and referred him to federal regulators.
A former White House teleprompter operator will pay $172,000 and accept a three-year trading ban to settle charges that he used advance copies of President Trump's speeches to place winning bets on prediction markets, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced Friday.
Gabriel Perez, who worked as a teleprompter operator and technical adviser, traded on Kalshi contracts that pay out based on whether a specific word or phrase appears in a presidential address. Because he loaded the text into the prompter, he knew the answer before the audience did. The CFTC said the trades ran from December 2025 through February 2026.
"In his position, Perez had access to presidential speeches prior to those speeches being delivered and Perez misappropriated that information, in breach of his duty of trust and confidence," the commission said in its order. Under the settlement, Perez will disgorge $107,500 in profits and pay a $65,000 civil penalty. The penalty was reduced because he cooperated with investigators. He has been removed from his White House position.
The case was not broken by a regulator. Kalshi's internal market surveillance flagged irregular trading in its speech-language contracts, froze an account holding more than $90,000 in profits, ran its own investigation and referred the matter to the CFTC. Prediction markets have spent the past two years arguing to Washington that they can police themselves the way a futures exchange does, and the company is likely to hold this up as evidence.
The timing sharpens the point. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that Kalshi's sports event contracts are wagers subject to state gambling law, rejecting the company's argument that federal commodities regulation preempts Nevada's authority. Kalshi has been fighting on two fronts, insisting to courts that its markets are financial instruments while demonstrating to regulators that it can run a surveillance operation like an exchange.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the conduct "unfortunate" and "a disgrace," and said the administration had removed Perez.
The episode exposes something structural about the market Perez was trading in. Contracts written on the contents of a speech create a class of insiders that ordinary securities law never contemplated: not executives or board members, but speechwriters, advance staff, communications aides and the technicians who handle the text. Every one of them holds the settlement value of the contract in advance. The CFTC's theory of the case, misappropriation of information in breach of a duty of trust, is the same one used against corporate insiders, and Friday's order is the clearest signal yet that the agency intends to apply it to the people around a podium.
Originally reported by CBS News.