A White House teleprompter operator who left his post amid accusations that he used inside knowledge to bet on Donald Trump’s speeches has been fined $172,000, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced. Gabriel Perez wagered on Kalshi about which words or phrases the president would use — a market whose outcomes he had advance access to through his job loading the speeches.
The CFTC ordered him to give up $107,539.02 in profits and pay a $65,000 civil penalty, a total the agency described as “a substantial discount” granted for what it called his exemplary cooperation. He also agreed to cease and desist from further violations of market-manipulation law and accepted a three-year trading ban.
The mechanics are the part worth dwelling on. From December to February, while employed by the White House, Perez placed bets tied to the content of speeches he was preparing. The CFTC’s position is that this misappropriated “material, nonpublic information,” breaching a duty of trust and confidence. His annual salary in the role was $175,000. The fine and disgorgement come to slightly less than what he made in a year; the profit he was ordered to return came to roughly three-fifths of it.
Perez is not an isolated case. The same dynamic has been producing indictments: about four months earlier, federal prosecutors charged a US soldier, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, over an alleged $400,000 Polymarket bet on whether Nicolás Maduro would be removed from Venezuela’s presidency — Van Dyke had worked on the operation that removed him. In April, Kalshi announced fines against three political candidates who bet on their own elections, including one who wagered on whether he would run for a Senate seat in Virginia before announcing his campaign.
Two features of the enforcement picture are worth keeping together. The first is political: Trump has defended the prediction-market industry, which his family has business ties to, and has argued against individual states regulating these markets — that the CFTC should do it instead. The second is procedural: in announcing the Perez penalty, the CFTC made a point of thanking Kalshi for its “assistance” in the matter. The platform that hosts the market is a partner in policing it.
The structural point is not that the CFTC caught one person. It is that markets whose entire product is information create a direct financial return on having better information than the public — and the population positioned to have it is the population with access to the government. Perez had a modest job and a five-figure payoff. The markets are now large enough, and broad enough in what they cover, that the same logic applies far up the org chart.