The White House announced Thursday that U.S. President Donald Trump has placed his longtime personal teleprompter operator on unpaid administrative leave following explosive allegations that the staffer used insider access to profit from bets on prediction markets tied to the content of the president’s public speeches.
According to reporting from ABC News, the suspended staffer, Gabriel Perez, who has worked with Trump on managing his speech teleprompters since the former president’s 2016 campaign, allegedly earned more than $100,000 through wagers on the prediction platform Kalshi. The bets centered on guessing which specific words and phrases would be included in major Trump speeches, including February’s State of the Union address, the president’s remarks to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and a primetime national address delivered last December. ABC’s reporting also notes that Perez even adjusted his bets mid-speech when Trump deviated from prepared scripts, backing out of wagers when the president skipped planned lines containing keywords he had bet on.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the suspension to reporters, stating that both the president and her office viewed the alleged misconduct as “deeply unfortunate and frankly a disgrace.” Leavitt added that Perez will no longer serve in any capacity at the White House, noting that the decision to remove him was made directly by President Trump. When asked about Thursday evening’s scheduled national address from the president, which is focused on protecting U.S. election integrity, Leavitt confirmed that a new teleprompter operator would fill the role.
Officials from Kalshi, the prediction market where the wagers were placed, say their internal surveillance team first flagged the suspicious trading activity after unusual patterns jumped out to their analysis team. The platform quickly notified the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the U.S. federal regulator that oversees such trading platforms, and has turned over all collected evidence to regulators as part of the ongoing investigation. Robert DeNault, Kalshi’s head of enforcement, confirmed in a statement to AFP that the platform has fully cooperated with regulators, consistent with its standard protocols for suspicious activity referrals.
Kalshi also confirmed that more than $90,000 in alleged profits from Perez’s bets were frozen in his account before he could withdraw the funds, and that the parties are currently in negotiations over a potential settlement. The revelation comes amid growing national scrutiny of prediction markets over repeated insider trading concerns; such platforms are already outright banned in a number of countries, and this case marks the second high-profile insider trading scandal tied to U.S. insiders using prediction markets in recent months. A U.S. soldier is currently facing federal felony charges for using classified information about the January mission to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro to place winning bets, reportedly netting more than $400,000 in profits from the trades.
The White House has pushed back against suggestions that its internal ethics rules are lax, with Leavitt noting that the administration enforces “very strict ethical guidelines” that explicitly prohibit the kind of activity Perez is alleged to have engaged in. However, the incident raises new questions for the Trump administration: Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, has served as an advisor to Kalshi since January 2025, and publicly praised the platform after it correctly predicted Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election.