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Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator allegedly used his advance knowledge of the president’s speeches to win more than $100,000 on the prediction market Kalshi, according to ABC News, citing sources familiar with a federal investigation on the matter. Gabriel Perez, a technical assistant to the president who has operated Trump’s teleprompter since 2016, is in settlement talks with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over the alleged trades, ABC News reported Thursday.

Investigators found that Perez placed bets on more than a dozen of Trump’s speeches over a three-month period, including February’s State of the Union, a January address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and remarks at a March Medal of Honor ceremony, ABC News reported. The wagers ran on Kalshi’s “Mentions” market, where users bet on whether specific words or phrases appear in a public speech. In some cases, investigators said, Perez pulled out of a position mid-speech when Trump skipped a line containing a word he had bet on, according to the report.

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Kalshi’s surveillance team flagged the trades and referred them to the CFTC, ABC News reported. The CFTC’s settlement terms would likely require Perez to return his profits and stop making similar trades, according to the report. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan declined to open a criminal case.

Kalshi bars users from trading on information obtained through their jobs, and last month began requiring users to disclose their employer.

The White House on Thursday said Perez has been placed on unpaid administrative leave, according to media reports.

The episode follows the first two federal insider trading cases tied to prediction markets, involving a special forces soldier who bet on the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and a Google employee who bet on search trends using internal data.

Kalshi and Polymarket have spent the past year rolling out insider trading controls to convince Congress they can be trusted.

AI-assisted content: This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and was reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by a member of the Unchained editorial team before publication.

Trump’s Teleprompter Operator Allegedly Won Over $100,000 Betting on His Speeches via Kalshi

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