Gabriel Perez, the White House teleprompter operator who earned $175,000 a year, no longer works in the federal government, according to an anonymous White House official cited by The Guardian on July 28, 2026. The official would not confirm whether Perez resigned voluntarily or was fired. HuffPost, the Morning Call, and the Stamford Advocate all confirmed the departure the same day, citing the same White House source The Guardian.

Perez had been placed on unpaid leave earlier in July 2026 after an ABC News investigation reported that he used inside knowledge of President Trump's speeches to win more than $100,000 betting on prediction markets. Prediction markets are websites where people bet money on what will happen in the future, similar to betting on a sports game but for politics and world events. The bets allegedly included wagers on the State of the Union address ABC News.

The suspicious betting took place on a platform called Kalshi, which lets users place financial bets on specific words and phrases used in public speeches. Kalshi's rules explicitly prohibit betting based on secret information people gain because of their job, and the platform recently started requiring users to disclose where they work. Robert Denault, Kalshi's lawyer and head of enforcement, confirmed on X that the company's surveillance team flagged the trades, investigated them internally, and referred the matter to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency that regulates certain types of financial markets. Reuters reported the CFTC probe on July 16, 2026, noting that Perez was under investigation for potential insider trading — the illegal practice of profiting from information the public doesn't have Reuters.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt publicly addressed the allegations, describing the reports of insider trading as "deeply unfortunate and, frankly, a disgrace." Perez operated Donald Trump's teleprompter since 2016 and had traveled and worked alongside the president for roughly a decade, according to Yahoo News. A photograph published by The Guardian shows him adjusting a teleprompter at a caucus night party in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 2024.

White House personnel records published in the 2026 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff listed Perez's $175,000 salary for his teleprompter work. A site-restricted search of whitehouse.gov for "Gabriel Perez" returned no results as of July 28, 2026.

The broader context here involves a clash between new betting platforms and government access. Kalshi, which operates under CFTC oversight, has positioned its "Mentions" market as a place to bet on what public figures will say. When a federal employee who knows in advance what the president will say places bets on those exact words, it raises a question the legal system hasn't fully answered: do the rules against insider trading in the stock market also apply to bets on political speech?

Think of it like a casino. If a dealer knew what cards were coming and bet on the outcome, that would be cheating. Here, the "cards" are the president's words, and the person who saw them first allegedly bet on what they would be.

The CFTC investigation will likely examine whether Perez's advance access to speech content counts as material non-public information, a legal term for secret information that could affect prices once it becomes public. Kalshi's new requirement for employment disclosure suggests the platform itself is struggling to police insider activity when the definition of "inside information" stretches beyond corporate earnings to political speech. The gap between what platforms say in their rules and what they can actually enforce remains wide.

For federal ethics regulators, this case shows how hard it is to monitor employees whose jobs give them unusual access to information that could be worth money. A teleprompter operator holds a narrow but information-rich position. The outcome of the CFTC investigation could set a precedent for how government workers who aren't in financial roles are treated when they profit from government information through new types of betting platforms.

The broader stakes extend to prediction market operators. Kalshi's decision to flag, investigate, and refer the activity may strengthen its regulatory standing, but the incident also shows how vulnerable political betting markets are to insider activity. Other platforms offering similar products will likely face pressure to require the same kind of employment disclosure and surveillance.

Perez's decade-long proximity to the president adds another layer. His role placed him in rooms where policy and messaging decisions were finalized, creating a steady stream of information that could move markets. Whether the CFTC pursues enforcement or closes the investigation without action, the case establishes a framework for future inquiries into the monetization of political access through prediction markets.