CFTC takes $172,539 from Trump's teleprompter operator over Kalshi speech bets

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Friday ordered Gabriel Perez, for years the man who ran President Donald Trump's teleprompter, to give back $107,539.02 in trading profits and pay a $65,000 civil penalty. He also accepted a three-year ban from prediction-market trading. He is no longer on the federal payroll.

The order covers 49 trades Perez placed on Kalshi between December 2025 and February 2026. Thirty-nine of them won. The contracts were "mention markets": event contracts that pay out if the president uses a named word or phrase in a scheduled speech. The CFTC listed bets tied to the State of the Union, the National Prayer Breakfast, a Medal of Honor ceremony, rallies, and a Detroit Economic Club appearance.

Perez generally saw the text about an hour before Trump spoke. The commission said he owed the government a duty of trust and confidence, that he used material non-public information, and that he breached that duty. He did not admit the findings. The $65,000 fine is, the CFTC said, a "substantial discount" for "exemplary cooperation."

How Kalshi caught it

Bobby DeNault, Kalshi's lead lawyer, said the firm's own surveillance flagged the account. "A Kalshi surveillance investigation caught a White House staffer engaging in prohibited trading activity," he wrote on X. "It doesn't matter who you are." The exchange cooperated with the commission. That sequence is the part of the case that will outlast Perez. Prediction markets have grown by listing contracts on politics. This is the first public CFTC settlement that treats advance knowledge of a president's script as inside information for those contracts.

Perez travelled with Trump for about a decade and was often the last aide to see the remarks. That job is not a policy post. It is a technical post with a preview of the exact words that mention markets price. The commission's theory is simple: if you load the glass and then bet on the words, you are trading on information the rest of the market does not have.

What the numbers show

A 39-for-49 record is not a hobbyist run. The profit, $107,539.02, is large enough to trigger a federal order and small enough, next to reported salaries in the West Wing, to look like a side account. The three-year ban keeps him off Kalshi and any other CFTC-regulated event contract venue through 2029. He was placed on unpaid leave and then left government service.

Lawmakers have already introduced bills to limit political event contracts. The White House has told staff not to trade on confidential information. Friday's order gives those warnings a named defendant, a dollar figure and a method: the hour between the loaded teleprompter and the spoken sentence.

Two open questions sit outside the settlement. One is whether any other aide used the same markets. The CFTC did not say. The other is whether Kalshi will keep listing mention contracts on scheduled presidential remarks now that the surveillance file has produced a case. The exchange has not withdrawn the product. It has advertised that it turned the trader in.