White House Teleprompter Operator Fined Rp1 Billion for Insider Trading on Presidential Speeches
A teleprompter operator at the White House, Gabriel Perez, has officially settled an alleged insider trading case with the US futures regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The case stemmed from Perez’s privileged access to President Donald Trump’s speech scripts before they were delivered to the public.
According to a Wall Street Journal report on Friday local time, Perez agreed to pay a civil penalty of US$65,000 (Rp 1.14 billion) and surrender more than US$107,000 (Rp 1.87 billion) in betting winnings to the CFTC. He is also barred from trading for three years.
The CFTC said Perez exploited his position, which gave him access to presidential speech scripts before delivery, and used that information to place bets on the prediction platform Kalshi. According to the regulator’s records, Perez would read Trump’s speech scripts in advance before placing bets based on the words he found in them.
His method was fairly simple: if a word appeared in the speech script, Perez would buy ‘Yes’ contracts on the relevant prediction market. Conversely, he would take ‘No’ positions for words he knew were absent from the script. The CFTC noted that Perez changed his betting positions at least once based on non-public information he held about the speech content.
In total, Perez placed bets on more than a dozen prediction markets related to Trump’s speeches since December, including the State of the Union address in February and a major speech in July.
Kalshi was the first party to suspect Perez’s betting pattern. The company interviewed Perez, froze his account, and withheld more than US$90,000 in profits before handing over its internal investigation findings to the CFTC.
Kalshi’s head of government enforcement, Robert J. DeNault, stressed that anyone who violates company rules or federal law will face consequences, regardless of their position.
The White House had previously issued a memo in March prohibiting staff from using their positions to gamble on prediction platforms such as Kalshi. Former White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the White House was unaware of Perez’s betting activity and said President Trump was furious over the alleged insider trading by his own staffer. Perez has been suspended without pay since the case came to light.
The Perez case adds to a growing list of US enforcement actions against the misuse of confidential information in political prediction markets. Previously, a soldier involved in the operation to arrest former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was charged with using classified information to earn more than US$400,000 on the Polymarket platform — a case that is still ongoing with a not guilty plea.
US authorities are also preparing charges against another military member suspected of earning more than US$1 million from bets related to military strikes in Iran and Venezuela, and are investigating a KPMG accounting firm employee over bets on public company earnings performance. Charges in both cases could be filed this autumn, although a final decision has not yet been made.