President Donald Trump's teleprompter operator is under scrutiny following a report alleging that he made hundreds of thousands of dollars by using insider knowledge to place bets on Kalshi about what the president would say during his State of the Union address.
On Thursday, ABC News reported that Gabriel Perez, who has operated President Trump's teleprompter for about a decade, is in negotiations with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over allegations that he used insider knowledge to place bets on Trump's speeches.
Those bets were made over three months, including a speech Trump made in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. At different points, Perez adapted to Trump's frequent deviations from the teleprompter and would allegedly "back out of certain bets mid-speech," ABC News reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Kalshi alerted the CFTC to the suspicious trading activity, according to the report. The company told ABC News that its surveillance team quickly flagged the trades and referred the matter to regulators.
The White House and Kalshi did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Block.
