Gabriel Perez had one of the more unusual positions in the White House — he operated the teleprompter for President Trump. He also, according to sources familiar with the matter, used that access to make over $100,000 betting on prediction markets about what Trump would say.

Federal investigators with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are in settlement talks with Perez over allegations that he used inside knowledge of Trump's prepared remarks to place winning bets on Kalshi, a prediction market platform. The case was first reported by ABC News.

Kalshi's own surveillance team caught the unusual trading activity and flagged it to the CFTC before regulators came knocking. "Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC, and we are cooperating and assisting regulators," said Kalshi lead lawyer Bobby DeNault.

The White House said Perez is "fully cooperating with the CFTC" and noted the administration has "strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow." As of this writing, Perez remains employed as a teleprompter operator.

Why This Is Both Funny and Genuinely Concerning

The obvious irony here is that Trump is famously known for going off-script. His speeches are notorious for lengthy, unscripted tangents that wander far from whatever was loaded into the teleprompter. The fact that Perez could still make over $100,000 betting on prepared remarks in an administration that routinely ignores its own prepared remarks says something about how wide the information gap between insiders and the public actually is — even when the president is one of the most unpredictable communicators in modern political history.

What he had wasn't certainty. It was just more information than everyone else, and in prediction markets, that's enough.

This Isn't the First Time

Prediction market insider trading has become a recurring scandal during Trump's second term, and the Perez case is only the latest entry in a growing list.

Earlier this year, a U.S. soldier was arrested after accounts were found to have profited from accurately predicting the US military invasion of Venezuela before it was publicly announced. Before the Super Bowl, suspicious trading patterns on Polymarket correctly anticipated specific details of the halftime show that weren't public knowledge. Polymarket itself faced a separate investigation after being caught paying influencers to post fake betting videos to make the platform look more profitable than it was.

The common thread is that prediction markets — which function as essentially unregulated financial instruments where users bet real money on real-world events — have created a new category of insider trading risk that existing securities law wasn't designed to address. Information asymmetry that would be straightforwardly illegal in a stock market context exists in a legal gray zone on prediction platforms, and regulators have been slow to catch up.

The Bigger Conflict of Interest

What makes the Perez case land harder than a typical staffer scandal is the context surrounding it. Trump has been a vocal supporter of prediction market companies in their ongoing fights with state gambling regulators. His son Donald Trump Jr. serves as an advisor to both Polymarket and Kalshi — the same platform where his father's teleprompter operator was quietly getting rich off White House access.

The same week the Perez settlement talks became public, Trump was separately in the news over allegations of manipulating markets by promoting stocks on Truth Social before prices moved. The pattern of people in and around the administration profiting from information advantages — whether on prediction markets, stocks, or crypto — has become a consistent feature of this term rather than an isolated incident.

"Even his teleprompter guy is corrupt," one social media user wrote after the news broke. It was meant as a punchline. It's also just a description of what happened.

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