White House Teleprompter Operator Settles Insider-Trading Probe
Gabriel Perez agreed to pay a penalty and give up winnings to federal regulator CFTC
- The White House teleprompter operator under investigation for placing bets using proprietary information reached a settlement.
- Perez will pay a $65,000 civil penalty, give up over $107,000 in winnings, and will also be suspended from trading for three years.
- Federal regulators probed Perez for making more than $100,000 in wagers based on early access to President Trump’s speeches.
WASHINGTON—The White House teleprompter operator under investigation for placing bets using proprietary information faces penalties from the Kalshi prediction market and federal regulators after reaching a settlement.
Under the terms of the settlement, Gabriel Perez, the teleprompter operator, will pay a $65,000 civil monetary penalty and give up more than $107,000 won in bets to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He will also be suspended from trading for three years.
Kalshi’s lawyer and head of government enforcement Robert J. DeNault said in a social-media post late Friday that Perez was also subject to penalties by the company as part of the settlement.
“It doesn’t matter who you are: violate our rules or federal law and you will face the consequences,” said DeNault, who cited the CFTC announcement.
The settlement comes after federal regulators probed Perez for making more than $100,000 in wagers based on early access to President Trump’s speeches.
“In his position, Perez had access to presidential speeches prior to those speeches being delivered and Perez misappropriated that information,” the CFTC said Friday. The White House didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The federal agency said it appreciates Kalshi for its assistance with the probe.
Kalshi began to flag Perez’s bets earlier in the year and interviewed him, as part of an internal investigation. It also froze his account and kept more than $90,000 of his profits. The internal investigation was then referred to the CFTC.
The CFTC also disclosed that Perez made bets on at least a dozen markets related to Trump’s speeches since December, including predictions on what the president would say in an address to the nation and what places Trump would mention in his State of the Union. Trump addressed the nation in July and delivered his State of the Union in February.
“Before Perez traded each contract, he would read President Trump’s speech and place his trades based on the words he saw in the speech,” the CFTC wrote in a filing detailing Perez’s actions. “For example, he would only purchase a ‘Yes’ contract in a Trump mention market if he saw that the word on which the contract was based was contained in a copy of the speech President Trump would deliver. Similarly, Perez only placed ‘No’ trades on words he knew were not contained in President Trump’s prepared remarks.”
The CFTC said that Perez once changed his trading position on a prediction market based on his insight into Trump’s nonpublic prepared remarks.
The White House had previously warned staff against using their roles to make bets on prediction markets like Kalshi, including in a March memo from the White House Management Office. Then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the White House was unaware of Perez’s bets and that the president was furious over the idea of individuals in his administration trading on inside information. Perez was placed on unpaid administrative leave.
Federal authorities are continuing to expand their crackdown on trading conduct in prediction markets, which offer a way for users to bet on political races, sports, corporate performance and crypto and commodity prices. Earlier this year, federal prosecutors charged a soldier—who took part in the U.S. operation to capture former Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro—with using classified information to place winning wagers on Polymarket that Maduro would be removed from office. The winnings exceeded $400,000, according to prosecutors. He has pleaded not guilty.
More recently, federal authorities have been preparing charges against a U.S. servicemember who is suspected of placing Polymarket bets related to military strikes in Iran and Venezuela that earned him more than $1 million, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Federal authorities are also pursuing another case involving an employee at the global accounting and consulting firm KPMG. The employee is under investigation for betting on whether a specific public company would beat the consensus estimate for quarterly earnings. A KPMG spokesperson declined to comment. Charges in both cases could come this fall, although a final decision on bringing charges hasn’t been made, according to people familiar with the investigations.