CFTC Orders Former White House Teleprompter Operator to Pay $172,539 Over Kalshi Speech Trades

Meta description: CFTC ordered Gabriel Perez to disgorge $107,539.02 and pay a $65,000 penalty over Kalshi trades tied to Trump speech drafts.

Tags: CFTC, Kalshi, Gabriel Perez, Donald Trump, George Santos, Event Contracts

Market platform: Kalshi

Category: Regulation

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered Gabriel Perez, a former White House teleprompter operator, to give up $107,539.02 in profits and pay a $65,000 civil penalty for trading Kalshi event contracts with advance access to President Donald Trump’s prepared remarks. The CFTC’s August 28, 2026 order also imposes a three-year ban from trading on CFTC-registered entities.

The settlement is a direct test of how U.S. derivatives law applies to prediction-market contracts whose outcomes can be affected by nonpublic information held inside government. According to the CFTC, Perez used material nonpublic information from Trump’s prepared speech text to trade contracts that paid based on whether specific words or phrases appeared in public remarks.

What did the CFTC say Gabriel Perez traded?

Perez traded Kalshi “mention markets,” contracts tied to whether a named person says a specific word or phrase during a defined public event. The CFTC’s August 28 order says Perez opened his Kalshi account on December 8, 2025, and traded contracts connected to Trump’s public speeches while working as a White House teleprompter operator.

In that role, the CFTC said, Perez received access to prepared remarks about an hour before Trump delivered them. The agency found that Perez used information from those remarks to buy and sell event contracts between December 2025 and February 2026. The trades generated $107,539.02 in profits, which the order requires him to disgorge.

Perez consented to the CFTC order without admitting or denying the agency’s findings. The CFTC said the $65,000 civil monetary penalty reflected a substantial discount under the Division of Enforcement’s cooperation advisory because of what the agency described as Perez’s “exemplary cooperation.”

Why do speech markets raise a different insider-trading issue?

Mention markets are built around a narrow public outcome: whether a word, phrase, or topic appears in a specified speech or appearance. They settle based on the event’s result, not on a company’s earnings, a vote total, or a macroeconomic data release. That design makes the timing and custody of prepared remarks central to market integrity.

The CFTC’s order treats Perez’s access to Trump’s prepared remarks as material nonpublic information. Prepared text does not eliminate all uncertainty, since speakers can deviate from a script. But the order says Perez had advance access to information that other traders did not have and used it to place contracts before the speeches became public.

That distinction matters for prediction markets because speech, attendance, and appearance contracts can turn ordinary logistical access into trading-relevant information. A person who sees a final draft, attends a closed preparation meeting, or controls a public schedule may know more than the market before that information is reflected in prices.

How does this differ from the George Santos settlement?

The Perez order came four weeks after a separate CFTC settlement with former Rep. George Santos, but the two cases rested on different legal theories. In its July 31, 2026 release, the CFTC said Santos engaged in manipulative trading in a State of the Union event contract whose underlying event concerned his own attendance.

The Santos order required him to disgorge $17,569.98 in profits, pay a $17,500 civil monetary penalty, cease and desist from further violations, and accept a three-year trading ban. The CFTC said Santos traded a Kalshi contract titled “Who will attend the State of the Union?” and made material misrepresentations and omissions on social media about whether he would attend.

Perez’s case is different. The CFTC did not frame the Perez order around public statements designed to move a price. It framed the case around the alleged misappropriation of material nonpublic information obtained through a government role. That makes the Perez matter an insider-information case tied to access to prepared presidential remarks, rather than a manipulation case tied to public statements about a trader’s own conduct.

What did Kalshi’s regulatory status have to do with the case?

KalshiEX LLC is a CFTC-designated contract market. The CFTC announced on November 4, 2020, in Release No. 8302-20, that it had issued an order of designation to KalshiEX under Section 5 of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC Regulation 38.3(a). That status places Kalshi under federal derivatives-market oversight.

The Perez trading ban applies beyond Kalshi. The CFTC order bars Perez for three years from trading on, or subject to the rules of, any CFTC-registered entity. In practical terms, the sanction reaches the regulated futures and derivatives venues overseen by the agency, not only the prediction-market platform where the trades occurred.

Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Robert DeNault, said after the settlement: “It doesn’t matter who you are: violate our rules or federal law and you will face the consequences.” The statement came from the exchange, which has a direct interest in showing regulators and market users that misconduct on its venue can be detected and referred for enforcement.

How did the White House respond?

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt criticized Perez’s conduct in July, before the CFTC settlement was announced. The Associated Press reported that Leavitt called the conduct “unfortunate” and “a disgrace.” Perez was described in the CFTC action and subsequent reports as a former White House teleprompter operator.

The timing matters because the public record shows the issue had reached the White House before the August 28 order. The CFTC order itself supplies the enforcement findings and sanctions; the White House response supplies the administration’s public reaction to the conduct attributed to a former employee.

What does the order mean for prediction-market enforcement?

The Perez settlement gives the CFTC a concrete precedent for applying misappropriation-based enforcement to event contracts on a regulated prediction market. The order does not announce new rules for mention markets, nor does it state that the CFTC plans a category-wide proceeding. It does show that the agency is willing to use existing Commodity Exchange Act authority when a trader allegedly uses workplace access to nonpublic information.

For Kalshi and other event-contract venues, the case puts a specific operational risk in view. Markets based on speeches, appearances, and attendance can be exposed to people who work close to the event itself. That includes aides, production staff, schedulers, venue personnel, and others who may learn market-moving facts before the public does.

The immediate consequence is fixed by the August 28 order: Perez must disgorge $107,539.02, pay a $65,000 penalty, cease and desist from further violations, and stay out of CFTC-registered markets for three years. The next signal for the industry will come from whether the CFTC brings more cases using the same theory against traders with advance access to event outcomes.