Insider's Teleprompter: How a White House Staffer Made $100,000 on Trump's Words

Gabriel Perez, a staffer who operated the teleprompter for U.S. President Donald Trump during public speeches and placed bets on prediction market events on Kalshi, is no longer employed by the federal government. This was reported by the Associated Press, citing a source in the White House.

A White House spokesperson confirmed that Perez left his position but declined to specify whether he resigned or was fired. Earlier this month, the employee had already been suspended without pay amid allegations of using his official position to profit from bets related to the president's speeches.

What Are the Allegations

According to an earlier ABC News investigation, Perez used non-public information about the content and timing of Trump's speeches to place bets on the Kalshi prediction platform. It is alleged that he managed to earn over $100,000 this way.

The suspicious activity was flagged by Kalshi's own monitoring service. The bets placed by Perez showed a noticeable deviation from the typical behavior of other platform users, which drew the attention of the exchange's analysts. After an internal review, the information was passed on to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — the regulator responsible for overseeing derivatives and prediction markets in the country.

Kalshi's rules explicitly prohibit users from trading based on information obtained through their work or official position. Formally, this places Perez's situation alongside classic cases of insider information use, only instead of the stock market or crypto market, it involves a crypto-based market for event betting.

Reaction and Next Steps

The White House has not yet disclosed details of the internal investigation and has not commented on whether parallel checks are being conducted by other agencies. It is also unclear whether the CFTC will bring formal complaints against Perez himself or will limit its inquiry to the platform and its control procedures.

Kalshi itself previously emphasized that it actively cooperates with regulators and promptly responds to suspicious trading patterns on the platform. The case of the teleprompter operator has become one of the first high-profile examples where prediction markets — which have become a popular tool for betting on political and economic events — have faced accusations of insider trading at the highest level, close to the head of state.

AI Opinion

The situation demonstrates that the Perez case fits into a consistent pattern in 2026: prediction markets are already becoming the target of systematic scrutiny by U.S. authorities. Previously, Congress initiated investigations into Kalshi and Polymarket for insider trading, and Kalshi itself blocked three politicians for betting on their own elections. The technical aspects of oversight here deserve special attention: platforms rely on statistical deviations in the behavior of individual accounts rather than direct evidence of information leaks — a method that works but leaves room for errors and false positives.

A separate question is the institutional proximity of prediction markets to U.S. political figures: publications have already noted the involvement of the president's relatives in the structure of such platforms. The question arises: is the industry capable of building a reliable barrier between government support staff and the betting market on its own decisions, or will such stories repeat with every new cycle of regulatory attention?