The White House teleprompter operator accused of using advance knowledge of President Trump's speeches to win more than $100,000 on a prediction market has left federal employment, though officials won't say whether he was fired or quit.
Gabriel Perez, who had loaded presidential remarks into the teleprompter since 2016, is "no longer works in the federal government," a White House official confirmed Tuesday. The official would not say whether Perez resigned or was terminated. His departure came less than two weeks after the White House placed him on unpaid leave following an ABC News report that he had exploited his access to speech drafts to place winning wagers on the prediction market Kalshi.
The scheme, if the allegations hold, was simple: Perez knew what Trump was going to say before Trump said it, and he turned that knowledge into cash. Kalshi operates a "Mentions" market that lets users bet on specific words or phrases a public figure will use in a speech. A staffer who could read the prepared text hours in advance had an obvious edge, and allegedly used it across more than a dozen presidential appearances over roughly three months, Newsmax reported.
Investigators found that Perez didn't just bet on what the president would say. He also withdrew wagers in real time when Trump deviated from prepared remarks and skipped sections containing words Perez had bet on. That detail, reported by Newsmax, suggests the trading was not casual speculation but an active, speech-by-speech operation tied directly to the teleprompter feed.
The speeches Perez allegedly targeted included the February 2026 State of the Union address and Trump's January appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the New York Post reported. The total alleged profit exceeded $100,000, with more than $90,000 frozen by Kalshi after the platform's internal surveillance team flagged the suspicious activity.
Kalshi's head of enforcement, Robert Denault, posted on X that the platform's surveillance team "promptly flagged, investigated and referred these trades" to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal regulator with authority over prediction markets. His statement did not name Perez.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt did not mince words. She called the reports of insider trading "deeply unfortunate and, frankly, a disgrace." Fox News reported that Leavitt was attributing Trump's own reaction when she made the statement, and that the president directly ordered Perez placed on leave.
Leavitt also pointed to existing White House ethics rules. As Fox News reported, she told reporters:
"There are very strict ethical guidelines here at the White House that explicitly state not to do this."
A different operator handled the teleprompter for Trump's speech the evening the story broke. The White House moved quickly to distance itself from Perez, but the episode raises questions about how long the conduct went undetected inside the building.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan declined to pursue criminal charges against Perez, Newsmax reported. That decision leaves the matter in the hands of the CFTC, which received the referral from Kalshi's enforcement team. Perez is reportedly cooperating with the CFTC investigation, and Breitbart noted that ABC News had reported he was negotiating a settlement with the commission before his departure from federal service.
Whether that settlement materializes, and what penalties it might carry, remains unclear. The CFTC has not publicly commented on the status of its review. No formal charges or complaint filings have been announced.
Kalshi, for its part, has tightened its rules since the episode surfaced. The platform recently began requiring users to disclose their place of employment. Its existing policy already prohibited betting based on information users gained through their jobs, a rule Perez allegedly violated repeatedly.
Perez was not a senior policy adviser or a political appointee with a Senate confirmation hearing. He was a teleprompter operator, a behind-the-scenes technical role that nonetheless gave him front-row access to some of the most closely held documents in the White House: the president's prepared remarks. That a staffer at that level could allegedly run a months-long betting operation across more than a dozen speeches without triggering an internal alarm until an outside prediction market flagged it points to a gap in oversight.
Kalshi's surveillance systems caught what the White House's own ethics infrastructure apparently did not. The platform froze more than $90,000 in profits and sent the file to federal regulators. The White House acted only after ABC News broke the story.
Several questions remain unanswered. Did anyone else inside the White House know about the bets? Did Perez share speech content with others? Has Kalshi identified additional accounts tied to government employees? None of these questions have been addressed publicly.
Prediction markets are growing fast. Kalshi and its competitors now offer contracts on everything from Federal Reserve decisions to weather events to presidential rhetoric. The Perez case is an early test of whether the regulatory framework around these markets can keep pace, and whether the federal government's own personnel rules are equipped to handle a world where a staffer's routine access to information can be monetized with a few clicks.
The White House handled the fallout the right way: swift leave, public condemnation, and separation from federal service. But the fact that it took an outside platform's compliance team to catch a scheme running under the White House roof is the part that should keep ethics officers up at night.
