According to a report by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) on July 16, a White House text generator operator is suspected of using inside information to bet on the content of President Trump's speech, making a profit of nearly $100,000. The person is currently under investigation.
According to sources, in February this year, when President Trump took the stage to deliver his State of the Union address, one of the few people who were aware of the content of the speech allegedly used this information to place bets and profit from Trump’s speech. That person was President Trump’s technology assistant, Gabriel Perez.
Since Trump ran for president in 2016, Perez has been responsible for controlling the speech delivery. Sources say he is currently negotiating a settlement with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to resolve the accusation that he profited over $100,000 from using internal information from presidential speeches.
Gabriel Perez ABC News
The related transactions were conducted through the prediction market platform Kalshi. Users can trade contracts that are linked to real-world events on this platform, including betting on whether a speaker will mention specific words, phrases, or topics.
Kalshi told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that his analysis team noticed abnormal betting activities related to “mention markets” in March of this year. Such bets involve placing bets on whether a speaker will mention certain common words during their speech, such as specific countries, economic-related terms, or campaign slogans. The company discovered through account information that the involved user was a federal government employee who operated the podium at the White House. Kalshi had frozen the account before Perez could withdraw any profits, with the related earnings exceeding $90,000.
According to sources, in addition to the State of the Union address in February, investigators from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission also found that Perez placed bets on several dozen speeches made by Trump over a three-month period. These speeches included a key speech in December last year, a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January, and a speech at an honorary medal ceremony in March.
Sources also said that in some cases, when Trump temporarily skipped parts of his speech, Perez would withdraw some of the bets he had made during the speech. Perez recently answered questions from regulatory authorities and admitted to having carried out some of these transactions.
White House press secretary Carolyn M. Leavitt stated that she had communicated with Trump regarding this matter. Trump deemed such behavior “shameless,” and therefore decided personally to grant Perez unpaid administrative leave. She also added that Perez will no longer work at the White House.
The United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission has informed the federal prosecutors in Manhattan about this situation, but the prosecution decided not to initiate criminal investigations. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has not yet responded publicly to this matter.
