The Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have opened insider-trading investigations into former Republican congressman George Santos over trades placed on the prediction-market exchange Kalshi tied to his own February appearance at President Trump's State of the Union address, NPR reported Tuesday, citing three people with direct knowledge of the trades and two people familiar with Kalshi's compliance investigation.
Santos allegedly bet "no" on Kalshi's market for his own State of the Union attendance while publicly posting a video on X the day before the address saying he would be in the gallery, sending the contract's "yes" odds to a peak of roughly 76 cents — implying a 76% implied probability — before he failed to appear, NPR and the Daily Beast reported.
The three people with knowledge of the trades told NPR Santos cleared profits in the tens of thousands of dollars from the "no" position. Kalshi detected the activity, froze his account, and referred the case to both agencies; neither the CFTC nor the Justice Department returned NPR's requests for comment, and Kalshi declined to comment.
The probe is the first known federal investigation of a named individual for insider trading on a CFTC-regulated US event-contract exchange, and it lands in the middle of the regulator's most active enforcement quarter on prediction markets to date. Kalshi, last valued at $22 billion in a $1 billion raise confirmed in May, posted $5.42 billion in April taker volume — the first month it surpassed competitor Polymarket on that metric — and is the only US-domiciled Designated Contract Market currently running political event contracts at scale.
