Former Trump White House teleprompter operator to pay over $172,000 after insider-trading probe
Washington Examiner · RC · trust 71/100
The former White House teleprompter staffer who was charged with using privileged information to make bets on prediction markets will pay a $172,539.02 fine for his actions.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced on Friday that the former Trump administration staffer settled with the agency on paying back the $107,539.02 he made through his unethical prediction market bets plus an additional $65,000 civil penalty fine. The CFTC called the fine a “substantial discount” due to the staffer’s “exemplary cooperation” with the agency.
Gabriel Perez, the teleprompter staffer, was initially placed on unpaid administrative leave in mid-July and then suspended from his role after an ABC report broke the news that he had made the over $100,000 sum by placing bets on prediction markets. Perez had placed bets on specific words that President Donald Trump would use in his speeches.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters in mid-July that Trump thought the situation was “deeply unfortunate and frankly a disgrace.”
The CFTC announced Friday the full findings and terms of Perez’s settling charges, including a three-year trading ban on the former teleprompter staffer.
“The order finds that between December 2025 and February 2026, while working as a teleprompter operator for the White House, Perez traded presidential mention market contracts, which are event contracts reflecting words or phrases the President may use during his speeches,” The CFTC said in a statement.
“In his position, Perez had access to presidential speeches prior to those speeches being delivered and Perez misappropriated that information—in breach of his duty of trust and confidence—to trade presidential mention market contracts, generating over $107,500 in profits,” the CFTC statement continued.
Perez began working as a teleprompter staffer for Trump in 2016.
Perez’s example is one of several insider trading cases to hit the federal government this year, following another circumstance in which U.S. Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke was charged with using privileged, classified information to wager prediction market bets regarding the capture of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro ahead of the operation.
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