Former White House teleprompter operator fined $172,000 for Kalshi insider trades
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission settled Friday with Gabriel Perez, a former White House teleprompter operator, fining him $172,000 and banning him from trading for three years. Perez used non-public knowledge from his role to place bets on Kalshi event contracts predicting whether President Trump would use specific words or phrases in speeches. He made $107,500 from the trades. The settlement marks the CFTC's first enforcement action against a federal employee for insider trading on political event contracts.
The CFTC now has a concrete template for policing information asymmetry in political prediction markets. Platforms like Kalshi must build trader screening that flags or restricts users with government access, or risk platform-level liability when the next insider case lands. The ruling confirms non-public employment information counts as protected material in event contracts, not just traditional futures. Rivals Polymarket and ForecastEx face identical exposure.
The commission's dual-track approach, pairing civil settlements with criminal amicus briefs, signals it will not wait for slow rulemaking. A court endorsement of the military-intelligence test in the Maduro filing would extend insider-trading exposure to national-security-adjacent markets. That would force platforms to vet contract topics for information asymmetry before listing, raising the compliance cost of every new political market. The first platform the CFTC makes an example of will set the screening standard competitors race to match.