Trump suspends longtime aide Gabriel Perez as CFTC probe proceeds
President Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator, Gabriel Perez, is under investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for allegedly making nearly $100,000 by betting on the prediction market platform Kalshi using his advance access to the president’s prepared remarks, according to two people with knowledge of the probe who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Perez, a deputy assistant to the president who was paid $175,000 a year according to a report to Congress, is suspected of profiting on Kalshi’s “mention markets,” where traders wager on words and phrases the president will or will not say during public events. The alleged bets were placed on more than a dozen of Trump’s speeches over a three-month period, including his State of the Union address, a primetime address in December, his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and his March speech during a Medal of Honor ceremony.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that Perez is on unpaid administrative leave, calling his alleged actions “a disgrace.”
In a statement, Robert DeNault, who heads enforcement at Kalshi, said the platform’s surveillance team detected the unusual betting activity that did not follow typical trading behavior and referred the trades to the CFTC.
“Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC after an exchange investigation. We have been assisting regulators on this matter and provided evidence we collected, as we do in any referral,” DeNault said.
Kalshi froze about $90,000 of Perez’s profits and banned him from betting on the site, according to one of the sources not authorized to speak publicly.
Trump would sometimes make references to Perez during campaign appearances, such as during a 2024 stop in Reno, Nevada.
“I have a guy, Gabe, he’s excellent. I’ve had some real bad ones, but I have Gabe, some of the bad ones, they go so fast. I will go and I say, slow the damn thing,” Trump said at the time. “No, a good one is really like gold.”
The case is the first known instance of a White House employee being investigated for allegedly using access to the presidency to profit on prediction markets. It follows a series of high-profile insider trading cases involving the platforms, including a U.S. Army special forces soldier charged in April with making $400,000 on Polymarket ahead of the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and a Google software engineer charged in May with using confidential company information to make $1.2 million on Polymarket. MSI previously reported that the Justice Department investigated former congressman George Santos over a Kalshi bet on his own attendance at Trump’s 2026 State of the Union address.
White House staff received a memo in March, reviewed by NPR, warning that using nonpublic government information to place bets on Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket is a criminal offense. The memo stated that it is “a very serious offence and will not be tolerated.”
Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, told ABC News: “The White House has strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow. The staffer in question is fully cooperating with the CFTC.”
Perez did not return a request for comment. ABC News first reported on the investigation.