Every White House has its share of odd little power centers, jobs nobody thinks about until something goes wrong. Gabriel Perez had one of the odder ones. He has scrolled Donald Trump’s speeches across a screen since the 2016 campaign, a role that sounds clerical right up until you realize it means knowing exactly what the president is about to say before the president says it.
Perez, it turns out, found a rather profitable use for that advance notice, and now he is negotiating a settlement with federal regulators over more than $100,000 in alleged winnings.
The setup itself was almost embarrassingly simple. Kalshi, the prediction market platform, runs a “Mentions” market where users wager on whether a public figure will say a specific word or phrase during a speech. For most bettors, that is a guessing game dressed up as finance. For the man holding the actual script, it was closer to reading the answers off the back of the test.
Kalshi did not stumble onto this by accident, either. The company said its analysts flagged the trades and looped in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency now tasked with regulating event contracts the way it once regulated pork belly futures.
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Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Robert DeNault, laid it out in a statement to CNBC: “We have been assisting regulators on this matter and provided evidence we collected, as we do in any referral.” CNN reports the frozen profits landed just north of $90,000, a number that splits the difference between rumor and the round figure everyone keeps repeating.
What really ties the allegations together is the paper trail investigators say they found inside the bets themselves. Sources told ABC News that on more than one occasion, Perez pulled out of a wager in the middle of a speech the moment Trump skipped a line Perez had been assigned to display. That’s not the sort of move someone makes by chance.
It makes a lot more sense if the person placing the bet already knew exactly what was supposed to be said and could tell the instant the speech went off course. Trump, after all, has never hidden the fact that he frequently abandons the teleprompter, once telling the Detroit Economic Club he strays from it roughly eighty percent of the time. That habit, investigators believe, may have made Perez’s advantage disappear the moment Trump started improvising.
There is a name for this particular flavor of trouble, and it comes with a genuinely fun backstory. The “Eddie Murphy Rule” traces back to a 1983 insider trading sting and now lives inside the Commodity Exchange Act, barring trades built on nonpublic information picked up through government work.
The CFTC has leaned on it hard this year, having already gone after a soldier who bet on Venezuela’s Maduro and a Google employee who bet on internal search data before Perez’s name ever came.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
