President Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator has been suspended from the prediction market Kalshi for using insider information about the president’s speeches to gain more than $100,000.
Kalshi said Friday it has reasonable cause to believe that Gabriel Perez, who has been a teleprompter operator since Mr. Trump’s first term in office, bet on Kalshi’s “Mentions” market, where users can wager on whether specific words, phrases or topics are said during a public speech.
As someone who produced televised White House content, he loaded remarks into a teleprompter and had “advanced access to material non-public information regarding the content of Politician A’s remarks,” Kalshi said.
Politician A is unnamed, but federal investigators allegedly found that Mr. Perez wagered on the president’s State of the Union address in February, according to multiple reports.
The White House suspended Mr. Perez in July after the prediction market platform flagged suspicious trades.
The Washington Times has reached out to the White House for comment.
Between December and February, while working as a teleprompter operator for the White House, Mr. Perez bet on words or phrases the president would use during his speeches, given his exclusive access to presidential speeches, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
“Perez misappropriated that information — in breach of his duty of trust and confidence — to trade presidential mention market contracts,” generating over $107,500 in profits, the commission said Friday in a statement.
Under his Friday settlement with the CFTC, Mr. Perez is required to pay more than $170,000, including a $65,000 civil monetary penalty and $107,539.02 in disgorgement; almost $92,000 of that will come from funds held in his Kalshi account.
Mr. Perez is suspended from Kalshi for three years. Kalshi noted that he did not admit or deny any of the platform’s findings or conclusions as part of that settlement.
Amid reports of his trades in mid July, then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Mr. Trump believes such actions are “deeply unfortunate and, frankly, a disgrace.”
When questioned at the time about more regulations, Ms. Leavitt said there are “very strict ethical guidelines here at the White House that explicitly state not to do this, and the White House counsel’s office makes that clear to all of us who sign up to work in government on behalf of the president.”
The White House issued an email warning staff in March not to use non-public information to place bets on prediction markets and financial platforms, reminding employees that federal ethics rules ban using confidential government data for personal or third-party financial gain, according to multiple reports.
The warning came amid separate concerns over unusually timed trades in oil futures and prediction markets around Trump administration decisions involving Iran.
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