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Disclaimer: Real News No Bullshit is in a multi-year partnership with Kalshi. That partnership has no bearing on what we cover, and this story was reported and written independently.  

A longtime White House teleprompter operator has been placed on unpaid leave and is under federal investigation after allegedly using his advance knowledge of President Trump’s speeches to make around $100,000 betting on prediction markets.

Getting into it: First reported by ABC News, Gabriel Perez, who has run Trump’s teleprompter since his 2016 campaign, is in settlement talks with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over allegations he placed bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period, including the State of the Union, a Davos address, and a Medal of Honor ceremony. As a deputy assistant to the president paid $175,000 a year, Perez typically has the final eyes on nearly all of Trump’s prepared remarks. Investigators say he monitored his bets in real time during live broadcasts, sometimes backing out of positions mid-speech when Trump skipped over a word Perez had wagered he’d say.

The bets ran through Kalshi’s “mentions” market, where people put money on whether a given word, phrase, or topic gets said during a public appearance. The activity was caught by Kalshi’s own surveillance team, which flagged the unusual betting, discovered the account belonged to a federal employee, froze roughly $90,000 in profits, and referred the case to regulators.

In a statement, Kalshi’s enforcement head Robert DeNault said, “Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC after an exchange investigation.” He added that the company handed over evidence it collected. Kalshi’s rules bar users from betting on information obtained through their jobs, and last month the company started requiring users to disclose their employer.

The White House moved quickly once the story broke. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump called it “a disgrace” and personally decided to put Perez on unpaid leave, adding he “will no longer be here.” Notably, the White House had already warned staff in a March internal memo not to use nonpublic government material for betting on prediction markets, calling it a serious criminal offense that “will not be tolerated.”

This all comes as lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle have been calling for tighter regulation of prediction markets, with some pushing to outright ban US lawmakers, their spouses, and even White House officials from making these kinds of bets.