White House teleprompter aide suspended over alleged Kalshi insider bets
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Trump believes his teleprompter operator is a 'disgrace' for allegedly placing bets on Kalshi. Leavitt added that no other staffers are under investigation and that the White House counsel had no awareness of the alleged bets.
Kalshi's own systems caught the trades first, but the platform now faces a CFTC test of whether those controls worked fast enough. A finding that detection lagged would tighten audit standards for all CFTC-registered prediction markets. The case also widens the insider-trading debate beyond finance to political staff with advance knowledge of official remarks.
Speechwriters, operators, and schedulers could all become compliance risks. Kalshi must prove it can police abuse from government employees with repeated non-public access, or regulators may question whether politically sensitive contracts belong on regulated venues at all.
The Perez case joins Kalshi's Michigan standoff with the CFTC and its New York injunction loss as the third major regulatory or legal front the platform faces simultaneously, testing whether its compliance systems can withstand scrutiny across federal enforcement, state courts, and now an internal insider-tracing probe.