President Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator is under investigation by federal regulators in connection with bets he made on prediction market platform Karshi related to the president’s comments.
The operator allegedly made more than $90,000 in profits from the trades, but most of the funds were frozen by Kalsi after bets on the platform’s “Mentions” market were flagged as suspicious, the company said. The market includes contracts for the words and phrases Trump will say during his scheduled speeches.
The operator was Gabriel Perez, who has operated the teleprompter for Trump’s speeches since the 2016 presidential election, a person familiar with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission investigation of the trades said on condition of anonymity.
File photo: Gabriel Perez checks a teleprompter before Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump arrives to address early results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. on November 6, 2024.
Carlos Barriareuter
White House press secretary Caroline Levitt, without naming Perez, said the teleprompter operator under investigation had been placed on unpaid leave and was not working on the equipment ahead of Trump’s address to the nation Thursday night.
“Of course I am aware of the reports,” Levitt said at a press conference.
“So is the president. I’ve talked to him about this. He believes this is very unfortunate and frankly disgraceful.”
“The individuals cited in that report are in compliance with the CFTC,” Levitt said. “So, of course we’ll have a teleprompter operator tonight, but unfortunately he’s not an operator.”
“The White House has very strict ethical guidelines on matters like this, and as I said earlier, this person is no longer here,” she said.
“It was the president’s decision, so I think that says it all,” Levitt said.
“After investigating the exchange, our surveillance team immediately flagged these transactions and referred them to the CFTC,” Robert Denor, Carsi’s head of enforcement, said in a statement to CNBC.
“We are assisting the regulator in this matter and have provided the evidence we have collected as we have in other inquiries,” Denor said.
The CFTC declined to comment.
Carsi said the company’s monitoring in March flagged the trading of contracts related to President Trump’s public statements that did not follow typical buying and selling patterns.
Some trades were reported separately by market makers in so-called whistleblower channels.
According to the company, Kalsi’s surveillance analysts used data collected during customer onboarding and monitoring procedures to discover that account holders worked for the federal government and teleprompter operators.
Kalsi then froze the account and kept nearly all of the profits.
Perez’s investigation was first reported by ABC News.
In addition to Trump’s State of the Union address in February, CFTC investigators found that Perez placed bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period, including a prime-time address in December, a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, and President Trump’s remarks at the Medal of Honor ceremony in March, the outlet reported, citing sources.
Perez’s LinkedIn page identifies him as an employee of VIP Prompting, a company that has reportedly operated the White House teleprompter since the 1960s.
Officials who answered the phone during VIP prompting Thursday declined to comment.
Kalsi prohibits insider trading on its platform and will take steps throughout 2026 to crack down on speculators who use material non-public information to trade in the market.
The company recently introduced new requirements for traders in certain markets to provide details of their employment status. Those changes were announced in June, and Perez’s trade was said to have been discovered in March.
The CFTC’s investigation into Perez comes on the heels of two large-scale insider trading cases involving prediction market platforms.
In April, a U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant major was arrested on federal criminal charges in a case in which prosecutors allege he made large profits in event contracts on the Polymarket platform related to the U.S. military mission to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke is said to have been involved in the planning and execution of the successful attack. Mr. Van Dyke is facing a civil lawsuit from the CFTC for his alleged actions.
In May, federal prosecutors filed the following charges: google Employee Michele Spagnuolo committed fraud related to a polymarket agreement that was allegedly based on internal data related to Google’s “Search Year” list.
— CNBC’s Megan Cassella contributed to this article
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalsi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and minority ownership.
