Gabriel Perez, a technical assistant to U.S. President Donald Trump, has been operating his teleprompter since the 2016 election. Now, according to ABC News, Perez is talking to federal investigators to settle allegations that he used inside knowledge of Trump’s speeches to win more than $100,000 on bets via the betting platform Kalshi.
ABC News journalists Katherine Faulders, Aaron Katersky, Peter Charalambous and Nicholas Kerr report that according to “sources familiar with the matter,” Kalshi notified the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) of activity they found suspicious.
Bobby DeNault, Kalshi’s main attorney, told ABC News, “Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC, and we are cooperating and assisting regulators.”
Kalshi has a strict policy against users placing bets based on information they obtained through their jobs.
Davis Ingle, a Trump White House spokesperson, told ABC News that “the staffer in question is fully cooperating with the CFTC” — although a CFTC spokesperson declined to be interviewed.
“In addition to the State of the Union,” Faulders, Katersky, Charalambous and Kerr explain in their ABC News article, “sources said CFTC investigators discovered that Perez placed bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period, including a December primetime address, a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Trump’s remarks in March during a Medal of Honor ceremony. Later in March, the White House issued an internal memo warning staff against using nonpublic information to place bets on prediction markets, sources previously confirmed to ABC News.”
The reporters add, “Perez continues to serve as one of Trump’s teleprompter operators — a role he has served since Trump’s first presidential campaign. Of all Trump’s closest aides, sources say Perez typically has the final eyes on nearly all of the president’s prepared remarks — and is often known to take last-minute edits from Trump himself.”
Perez, according to Faulders, Katersky, Charalambous and Kerr, “previously came under scrutiny by congressional and federal investigators over the edits that were made prior to the delivery of Trump’s remarks surrounding the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.”
“According to sources familiar with the investigation,” the ABC News journalists report, “Perez sat for an interview with regulators in recent months and acknowledged some of the trades. At some point during the investigation, the sources said the CFTC alerted federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who declined to open a criminal investigation. Regulators at the CFTC have expressed a willingness to settle with Perez, and have discussed terms with him that would require Perez to give back his profits and refrain from making similar trades, according to sources familiar with the ongoing discussions.”
On X, Flaunders tweeted, “Our sources tell us that in certain instances, investigators uncovered times when Perez would back out of certain bets mid-speech when Trump skipped over a portion of the speech that included a word he had previously bet would be mentioned.”