Gabriel Perez #

Introduction #

Gabriel Perez is an American White House staffer who spent a decade as the teleprompter operator for President Donald Trump, only to be placed on unpaid administrative leave in July 2026 after reports that he used advance knowledge of the president’s speeches to place bets on the online prediction market Kalshi, reportedly winning about $100,000. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called the apparent trades “deeply unfortunate and frankly a disgrace” and said the president himself had been informed of the situation. Two months later, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced that Perez had been ordered to pay $172,000 — his trading profits plus a civil penalty — and banned from trading on prediction markets for three years.

Background Information #

Perez had worked Trump’s teleprompter since 2016, serving as a technical assistant to the president. Government records show he earned an annual salary of $175,000 as a deputy assistant to the president and a technical adviser. A photograph run by The Guardian shows him making an adjustment to the teleprompter at Trump’s caucus night party in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 2024. The position also carried unusual access: a teleprompter operator sees the president’s speeches in full before anyone else hears them, meaning the exact words Trump was about to say passed through Perez’s station first.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation #

Allegations. The claims against Gabriel Perez come from press reporting and a civil settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He was never criminally charged, and the settlement resolves the claims against him without admitted liability. He has made no public statement; NBC News reported that he could not be reached for comment.

Perez’s cancellation came from inside the building he served. On July 16, 2026, the White House said Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator had been placed on administrative leave after reports that he used his position to win $100,000 by betting on the president’s speeches through Kalshi, an online prediction market. The activity reportedly centered on Kalshi’s “mentions” market, where participants can bet on whether certain words, topics, or phrases will be said during a public speech; according to the sources, Kalshi detected unusual betting patterns and alerted the CFTC, the federal agency responsible for overseeing prediction markets. Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Robert DeNault, said in a statement to ABC News, “Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC, and we are cooperating and assisting regulators.” Sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News that Perez had been negotiating with regulators to resolve allegations that he used advance knowledge of the president’s speeches to generate more than $100,000 in winnings; one source told CNN he earned more than $90,000 from the trades under investigation, though those profits had since been frozen. Leavitt said the employee had been placed on unpaid administrative leave, that another person would operate Trump’s teleprompter during that night’s address to the nation on election integrity, and that “the White House has extremely strict ethical guidelines with respect to issues like this.” She added in July that the trades were a breach of ethics and that “this individual will no longer be here.”

Public Reaction and Consequences #

The reaction came less from a fan base than from the institutions around him. Leavitt’s “deeply unfortunate and frankly a disgrace” stood as the White House’s public verdict, and she paired it with the assurance that “the White House has extremely strict ethical guidelines with respect to issues like this.” The story also broke amid intense scrutiny of prediction markets: the Justice Department had begun pursuing its first insider trading prosecutions tied to them — including a special forces soldier accused of betting on the capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and a Google employee accused of betting on user search activity, both of whom pleaded not guilty — and federal authorities had revealed the month before that they were investigating whether George Santos, the disgraced former Republican congressman, engaged in insider trading on Kalshi by betting on his own attendance at the State of the Union address. Kalshi itself had issued fines to three US political candidates who bet on the outcomes of their own elections in May. Against that backdrop, the apparent involvement of a White House staffer in betting on the president’s own words gave the young industry’s surveillance debate its most vivid example yet.

Current Status #

As of late August 2026, the CFTC’s order is the definitive word on the case. On Friday, August 28, the agency announced that Perez had been ordered to pay $172,000 — $107,539.02 in profits plus a $65,000 civil penalty — and that he was banned from trading on prediction markets for three years. The CFTC said Perez used “material, nonpublic information” he obtained through his job to place trades through Kalshi on “presidential mention market contracts, which are event contracts reflecting words or phrases the President may use during his speeches,” and it called the case one of insider trading. The agency also cited what it called Perez’s “exemplary cooperation” in the matter, and said Kalshi assisted. DeNault, described by NBC News as Kalshi’s lead lawyer, said in a post on X, “A Kalshi surveillance investigation caught a White House staffer engaging in prohibited trading activity. Today this individual was subjected to penalties by the CFTC and by our exchange.” The White House did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the order, and Perez could not be reached for comment.

Impact on Their Career/Life #

A decade at the president’s teleprompter ended with a press secretary’s declaration that “this individual will no longer be here,” and what Perez does next is, as of this writing, unknown. The financial toll is concrete: the $172,000 he was ordered to pay comes within a few thousand dollars of his $175,000 annual government salary, and he is barred from the prediction markets where the trades were made for the next three years. The outcome, notably, stayed civil: where the Justice Department has brought criminal insider trading prosecutions against prediction-market bettors elsewhere, Perez’s case ended in a settlement with the CFTC carrying no criminal charge. His reputation now rests on the government’s account and the reporting that preceded it — he has issued no public statement and was unreachable when NBC News sought comment. For a staffer whose entire job was making sure the president’s words arrived exactly as written, the irony is sharp: it was the words themselves, bet upon before they were spoken, that ended his White House career.