CFTC fines former White House teleprompter operator $172,000 for Kalshi insider trades
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined former White House teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez $172,000 for insider trading on Kalshi event contracts tied to President Trump's speeches. Perez used nonpublic information about presidential remarks to place bets on whether specific words or phrases would appear in addresses. The settlement requires disgorgement of roughly $107,000 in profits plus a $65,000 penalty. Perez is barred from accessing Kalshi for three years. The CFTC announced the enforcement action on August 28.
The Perez settlement gives the CFTC a concrete template for sweeping up federal employees who trade on political advance knowledge. Staffers with speech drafts, scheduling details, or policy announcements now face personal liability that reaches past election cycles into any contract they touch. Kalshi gains a second enforcement scalp it can wave at Congress and state attorneys general as proof of self-policing.
Rivals Polymarket and ForecastEx lack comparable public expulsion records. The CFTC's Friday-night timing at 8:14 p.m. ET signals a desire to land hard without preempting news coverage. Each settled case raises the bar for what platforms must prove to regulators about detection speed. A third federal employee case this quarter would establish insider trading in political event contracts as a standard CFTC docket item, not an anomaly.
The settlement extends a sharpening enforcement arc in which Kalshi has now publicly expelled three politically connected traders—Perez, Santos, and Buckhout—before regulators filed charges in each case.