A White House Teleprompter Operator Bet on the President's Words. The CFTC Has Ordered Him to Repay $107,539.

Kalshi lists contracts on whether a public figure will say a particular word. They are called mention markets, and they settle on the text of a speech. Someone who has the text before the speech is given holds the answer. On Friday the Commodity Futures Trading Commission settled with a man who did.

The order

Release 9289-26, dated August 28, 2026, concerns Gabriel Perez, a teleprompter operator for the White House. The CFTC says he traded presidential mention market event contracts on KalshiEX between December 2025 and February 2026. The consent order requires disgorgement of $107,539.02 and a civil monetary penalty of $65,000, bans him from trading for three years, and orders him to cease and desist from further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations. The release is headlined at a rounded total of $172,000.

The agency's description of the conduct is compact: in his position, Perez had access to presidential speeches prior to those speeches being delivered, and he misappropriated that information in breach of his duty of trust and confidence.

The theory being used

That is the misappropriation theory of insider trading, and it is worth noticing what it does not require. There is no company here, no security, and no issuer. What creates the duty is the employment relationship and the confidentiality that attaches to an undelivered speech. The information was not a corporate secret; it was a draft. The CFTC's position is that trading on it in a derivatives market is the same wrong as trading on an earnings figure.

The cooperation discount

The release states that the penalty includes a substantial discount under the Division of Enforcement's new cooperation advisory, because of Perez's exemplary cooperation with the CFTC. That makes this an early visible application of a policy the Division has adopted but which the release does not date or number. The size of the discount is not stated in the release; The Block reports it at roughly 40%.

How it surfaced

CBS News reports that Kalshi's surveillance function flagged trading patterns that deviated from typical behaviour, froze the account, locked more than $90,000 of profits, and referred the matter to the CFTC. The Block reports that Perez opened his Kalshi account on December 8, 2025, and read prepared remarks roughly an hour before delivery before trading; it quotes Kalshi head of enforcement Robert DeNault saying that it does not matter who you are, that violating the exchange's rules or federal law brings consequences. CBS also reports that the White House Management Office wrote to staff in March instructing them not to place prediction-market bets using nonpublic information.

The Block describes this as the second CFTC insider-trading settlement against a federal employee in four weeks, following a settlement with former congressman George Santos on July 31 for approximately $35,000 over Kalshi State of the Union trades.

Why it matters

Event contracts have grown faster than the case law around them. This order says that the ordinary market-abuse framework travels with them: an exchange's surveillance obligations, a duty of trust attaching to information, disgorgement of the profit, a trading ban. The novelty is the underlying asset, not the enforcement. For anyone whose job puts them near a text before it is public, the order is a straightforward statement that the text is material nonpublic information even when it is only a speech.