Trump's Teleprompter Operator Placed on Unpaid Leave Amid CFTC Insider Trading Probe

President Trump's longtime teleprompter operator is on unpaid administrative leave and will not return to the White House, according to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. The reason: federal regulators believe he used his access to the president's prepared remarks to make money betting on what Trump would say in public.

Gabriel Perez has worked for Trump since 2016, according to NPR. As a deputy assistant to the president, he was paid $175,000 a year, and Trump has publicly praised him at events, once telling a 2024 campaign crowd in Reno, Nevada, "I have a guy, Gabe, he's excellent... a good one is really like gold."

That access is now the subject of a federal investigation. Perez is negotiating with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over allegations he made more than $100,000 on Kalshi's "mention markets," contracts that let traders bet on specific words or phrases a public figure will say during a speech, according to Forbes, which cited an ABC News report attributed to unnamed sources.

The betting reportedly happened over roughly three months and touched more than a dozen speeches, including the State of the Union address in February 2026, a December primetime address, a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and a March Medal of Honor ceremony, according to Forbes. In some cases, Perez allegedly backed out of bets mid-speech when Trump went off-script, which is itself a strong signal he knew something the market didn't.

Kalshi says its own surveillance caught it. "Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC after an exchange investigation. We have been assisting regulators on this matter and provided evidence we collected, as we do in any referral," said Robert DeNault, Kalshi's head of enforcement, in a statement reported by both NPR and Reuters.

Reuters reported additional detail on how the detection worked. Kalshi identified the suspicious activity through its customer onboarding and market surveillance processes, then froze the account before the bulk of the profits, described as "somewhere over $90,000," could be withdrawn. Reuters also reported that market makers flagged irregularities through whistleblower channels, and that Kalshi conducted an internal interview with the trader.

Leavitt confirmed the basics Thursday but stumbled over the details in real time. "They'll be on paid administrative leave," she initially told reporters, before correcting herself: "I'm sorry, without pay. The administrative leave is unpaid." She called the alleged conduct "a disgrace," according to the New York Post.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told ABC News, as reported by Forbes, that "the White House has strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow" and confirmed Perez "is fully cooperating with the CFTC."

What regulators are considering

Forbes reported that federal regulators are weighing whether to ban Perez from making similar trades in the future and require him to return the profits. No charges have been filed. No formal enforcement action has been announced. This is a settlement negotiation, not a conviction, and Perez has not been publicly quoted defending himself or disputing the allegations in any of the reporting reviewed here.

The CFTC itself won't confirm or deny an investigation exists, a spokesperson told Reuters, which is standard practice for the agency and shouldn't be read as evidence one way or the other.

Why this isn't happening in a vacuum

Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have exploded in popularity, and with that growth has come a string of insider-trading cases. The Justice Department charged a U.S. soldier, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, with using classified information to bet more than $400,000 on Polymarket tied to the operation to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, according to Forbes. Separately, prosecutors charged a Google employee over Polymarket trades that netted $1.2 million, according to NPR.

Congress has started responding. The Senate passed a resolution in April 2026 banning senators from trading on prediction markets altogether, and the House is weighing similar legislation, according to Forbes.

Kalshi itself has been tightening its own rules. The company said in June 2026 it would require employment disclosures from users trading sensitive contracts and stand up a whistleblower portal, according to Reuters, moves clearly aimed at getting ahead of regulators rather than waiting to be forced into it.

The fairest read of the pushback here: some skeptics of prediction markets argue that "mention markets" built around a sitting president's unscripted remarks were always going to invite this kind of abuse, since a tiny circle of people (speechwriters, aides, teleprompter operators) know the script before the public does. That's a legitimate structural concern, not a conspiracy theory, and it's exactly the kind of insider-access problem that got a Google employee and a U.S. soldier charged in separate cases this year.

The open question now is what the CFTC settlement actually looks like, whether Perez is required to disgorge the money, whether he faces a trading ban, and whether any of this triggers criminal referral. None of that has been decided as of Thursday, July 16, 2026.