President Donald Trump‘s longtime teleprompter operator is under investigation by federal regulators in connection with bets they allegedly made on the prediction market platform Kalshi related to statements made by Trump.
The operator allegedly made more than $90,000 in profits on the trades, but most of that money was frozen by Kalshi after the bets on the platform’s “Mentions” market were flagged as suspicious, according to the company. That market includes contracts on words or phrases that Trump will say during a scheduled speech.
A person familiar with the investigation of the trades by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, identified the operator as Gabriel Perez, who has handled teleprompters for Trump speeches since the 2016 presidential campaign.
FILE PHOTO: Gabriel Perez checks a teleprompter before Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives to speak following early results from the 2024 U.S. presidential election in Palm Beach County Convention Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., Nov. 6, 2024.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, without naming Perez, said the teleprompter operator under investigation has been placed on unpaid leave and is not handling the device for Trump’s address to the nation on Thursday night.
“Obviously, I’m aware of the report,” Leavitt told reporters at a news conference.
“The president is too. I spoke with him about it. He believes it’s deeply unfortunate and, frankly, a disgrace.
“The individual that was cited in that report is complying with the CFTC,” Leavitt said. “So, there will be a teleprompter operator tonight, of course, but it will not be the one, unfortunately.”
She said that the “White House has extremely strict ethical guidelines with respect to issues like this, and as I just told you, this individual will no longer be here.”
“That was a decision by the president, so I think that speaks for itself,” Leavitt said.
Robert DeNault, Kalshi’s head of enforcement, in a statement to CNBC, said “Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC after an exchange investigation.”
“We have been assisting regulators on this matter and provided evidence we collected, as we do in any referral,” DeNault said.
The CFTC declined to comment.
According to Kalshi, the company’s surveillance in March flagged trades on contracts related to public statements by Trump that did not follow typical patterns of buying and selling.
Some of the trades were separately flagged by market makers in so-called whistleblower channels.
Kalshi’s surveillance analysts used data collected during the onboarding of customers and monitoring procedures to discover that the account holder worked for the federal government and a teleprompter operator, according to the company.
Kalshi then froze the account, retaining almost all of the profits.
The investigation of Perez was first reported by ABC News.
The media outlet, citing sources, reported that in addition to Trump’s State of the Union address to Congress in February “CFTC investigators discovered that Perez placed bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period, including a December primetime address, a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Trump’s remarks in March during a Medal of Honor ceremony.”
Perez’s LinkedIn page identifies him as an employee of VIP Prompting, a company that reportedly has operated White House teleprompters since the 1960s.
A person who answered the phone at VIP Prompting on Thursday declined to comment.
Kalshi bans insider trading on its platforms, and has taken steps throughout 2026 to crack down on speculators using material, nonpublic information to trade on its markets.
The company recently instituted new requirements for traders in certain markets to submit details on their employment status. Those changes were announced in June, and Perez’s trades were allegedly caught in March.
The CFTC’s investigation of Perez comes on the heels of two major insider trading cases involving prediction market platforms.
In April, a U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant was arrested on federal criminal charges in a case where prosecutors alleged he made hugely profitable trades on event contracts on the Polymarket platform related to the American military mission to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
The sergeant, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, allegedly was involved in the planning and execution of that successful raid. Van Dyke is being sued in a civil complaint by the CFTC for his alleged conduct.
In May, federal prosecutors charged a Google employee, Michele Spagnuolo, with fraud in connection with Polymarket contracts that allegedly were based on internal company data related to Google’s “Year in Search” lists.
— CNBC’s Megan Cassella contributed to this article
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment.
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