Gabriel Perez, a longtime teleprompter operator for President Trump, will surrender every dollar he made betting on presidential speeches and pay an additional $65,000 civil penalty after federal regulators caught him exploiting his privileged access.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced the settlement on Friday, closing a months-long probe into one of the more unusual insider-trading cases in recent memory. Perez, who loaded Trump's remarks onto the teleprompter before major addresses, used his advance knowledge of speech texts to place winning wagers on prediction markets, betting on specific words and phrases the president would say before he said them. The scheme ran from December 2025 through February 2026 and gathered more than $107,500 in profits, the Washington Examiner reported.
Under the settlement, Perez must pay $172,539.02, the full $107,539.02 in disgorgement plus a $65,000 civil penalty, and accept a three-year ban from trading. The CFTC called the penalty a "substantial discount," crediting Perez's "exemplary cooperation" with the investigation.
That cooperation may have spared him a steeper hit. But the discount does not change what the CFTC's own order describes: a federal employee who broke the trust his position required, then pocketed six figures doing it.
Perez had served as Trump's teleprompter operator since 2016, a role that put him in the room for nearly every major address. The job gave him something no outside trader could get: the exact text of a presidential speech before it was delivered. Between December 2025 and February 2026, he placed bets on what the CFTC calls "presidential mention market contracts", event contracts tied to whether the president would use certain words or phrases during a given speech.
The CFTC's order laid out the mechanics plainly:
"In his position, Perez had access to presidential speeches prior to those speeches being delivered and Perez misappropriated that information, in breach of his duty of trust and confidence, to trade presidential mention market contracts, generating over $107,500 in profits."
Perez wagered on more than a dozen presidential appearances, Newsmax reported, including the State of the Union, Trump's Davos speech, and a Medal of Honor ceremony. Investigators found instances where Perez backed out of wagers mid-speech when Trump skipped sections of prepared remarks containing words he had bet would be used. That detail alone suggests he was watching the addresses in real time, adjusting his positions as the president deviated from the script he had loaded minutes earlier.
The prediction market platform at the center of the case, Kalshi, flagged the suspicious activity before regulators did. Robert DeNault, Kalshi's head of enforcement, said the company's internal monitoring picked up the unusual pattern of winning trades in March and froze Perez's account, which held more than $90,000 in profits at the time.
DeNault told reporters that Kalshi's surveillance team "promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC after an exchange investigation," Breitbart reported.
That a private platform caught the scheme before the government did says something about the state of oversight on prediction markets, a fast-growing industry that federal agencies are still learning to police. It also means Kalshi's compliance infrastructure worked as designed, at least in this case.
The White House moved quickly once the story broke. ABC News first reported in mid-July that Perez had made over $100,000 from his prediction market bets. Within hours, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Perez had been placed on unpaid administrative leave by direct decision of the president.
Leavitt did not hold back. She told reporters that Trump considered the situation "deeply unfortunate and, frankly, a disgrace," and pointed to existing internal rules that should have prevented it.
The New York Post reported that Leavitt also noted the White House has "very strict ethical guidelines" that "explicitly state not to do this." Perez was subsequently suspended from his role, and Newsmax later confirmed he left federal employment entirely less than two weeks after the news broke.
No one in the White House defended Perez or tried to minimize what he did. The response was swift and unambiguous, a marked contrast to how other administrations have handled embarrassing staff conduct.
Perez is not the only government employee caught exploiting privileged information on prediction markets. The Washington Examiner noted a parallel case involving U.S. Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was charged with using classified military information to place prediction market bets on the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro ahead of the operation. Van Dyke allegedly won $409,000, Fox News reported.
The two cases together expose a vulnerability that regulators and national security officials cannot afford to ignore. Prediction markets are growing fast. Platforms like Kalshi now offer contracts on everything from Federal Reserve decisions to presidential speeches. The contracts are legal, and for most traders, they are a legitimate way to wager on public events. But for anyone with advance access to government information, a speech text, a troop deployment, a policy announcement, the temptation is obvious, and the guardrails are still thin.
The CFTC settlement with Perez sends a signal that the agency is willing to act, but a $65,000 civil penalty on top of disgorgement is not exactly a deterrent that keeps government insiders awake at night. Perez kept nothing from the scheme and lost his job. Whether that outcome discourages the next staffer with a login and a speech draft on his screen is an open question.
Several questions remain. The CFTC order does not specify whether Perez admitted wrongdoing as part of the settlement or entered it without conceding liability. The legal basis cited in the order, beyond the broad finding of misappropriation in breach of a duty of trust, has not been made public in the reporting so far. And it remains unclear whether any criminal referral accompanied the civil action. Just The News noted the full disgorgement and penalty but did not report any criminal charges.
The scope of the three-year trading ban, whether it covers all regulated markets or only prediction contracts, is also unspecified in available reporting. For a man who made his living loading speeches onto a screen, the ban may be academic. But for the broader prediction market industry, the enforcement precedent matters.
Perez worked for Trump for a decade. He had one of those invisible jobs that only becomes visible when something goes wrong. Loading a teleprompter is not glamorous work, but it puts you closer to the president's words than almost anyone outside the speechwriting office. Perez turned that access into a side hustle, and the CFTC shut it down.
When the people trusted with the machinery of government use it to line their own pockets, accountability has to be fast, public, and complete, no matter how small the role or how novel the scheme.
