According to a report, a White House teleprompter operator is under investigation for allegedly using inside information to bet on President Trump’s speech content, raking in nearly $100,000 in profits.
Sources say that back in February, when Trump took the stage to deliver his State of the Union address, among the few people who knew the speech script in advance, one person was reportedly using that info to place bets and cash in on Trump’s words. That person is Gabriel Perez, a presidential technical assistant.
Perez has been handling the teleprompter for Trump since his first presidential campaign in 2016. Sources now say he’s in talks with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to settle allegations that he made over $100,000 from insider knowledge of the president’s speeches.
Gabriel Perez (Source: ABC News)
The bets were placed on Kalshi, a prediction market platform where users trade contracts tied to real-world events—like whether a speaker will mention specific words, phrases, or topics.
Kalshi told the BBC that its analytics team noticed unusual betting activity in “mention markets” back in March. These markets let users wager on whether a speaker says common words, such as names of countries, economic terms, or campaign slogans. By checking account details, the company found the user was a federal employee working as a White House teleprompter operator. Kalshi froze his account before he could withdraw any profits, which totaled over $90,000.
According to sources, CFTC investigators also found that Perez placed bets on more than a dozen of Trump’s speeches over three months, not just the State of the Union address in February. These included a major speech in December last year, an address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January, and a Medal of Honor ceremony in March.
Sources add that in some cases, when Trump ad-libbed and skipped parts of his prepared remarks, Perez would cancel some of his bets mid-speech. Perez was recently questioned by regulators and admitted to making some of the trades.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said she discussed the matter with Trump, who called the actions “disgraceful” and personally decided to place Perez on unpaid administrative leave. She added that Perez will no longer work at the White House.
The CFTC had referred the case to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, but they decided not to launch a criminal investigation. The CFTC has not yet publicly commented on the matter.