Warren and Merkley Press White House on Kalshi Speech-Bets Case

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley have given the White House until November 23, 2026, to explain its handling of Gabriel Perez, the former White House teleprompter operator who paid $172,539.02 to settle CFTC charges over trades on Kalshi's speech-content markets. Warren's office published the letter to White House Counsel Will Scharf on November 10, one day after its date of November 9.

Perez settled with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on August 28, 2026. The settlement totaled $172,539.02, including a $65,000 civil penalty, and the CFTC imposed a three-year trading ban. He profited on 39 of 43 contracts between December 2025 and early 2026, netting $107,539 by betting on what Trump would say in his speeches — information he had in advance because he loaded the teleprompter.

What are the senators demanding?

The letter requests a written response covering several specific items:

• Whether Scharf would recommend that President Donald Trump grant clemency to Perez;
• What ethics training White House staff receive on prediction markets;
• Details of contacts between the White House and regulators regarding Perez;
• Whether any other White House personnel have engaged in similar trading.

The clemency question is the sharpest element. It forces the White House counsel to state, on the record, whether a staffer who profited from insider access might receive a presidential pardon. Nothing in the letter indicates a pardon is under consideration, but the public framing pressures the administration to answer or visibly decline to.

According to the research summary accompanying the letter, Warren and Merkley view the administration's response so far as thin — in their assessment, little beyond warning staff.

How did the case unfold?

The trades centered on Kalshi's so-called mention contracts, markets where traders bet on whether a specific word or phrase will appear in a speech. Perez held advance knowledge of the speeches' contents and converted that edge into a 39-of-43 win rate.

Kalshi's internal surveillance flagged the activity and froze his account before regulators acted. Kalshi operates as a CFTC-regulated Designated Contract Market, and that status gave the CFTC jurisdiction over the case.

Why do mention contracts raise new ethics questions?

Mention contracts assign a price to speech content itself. Anyone with early access to a draft — speechwriters, aides, or the operator loading the teleprompter — holds tradeable information before the public does.

That is the gap Warren and Merkley appear to be probing. Their request for training records is effectively a question about whether the White House has updated its ethics rules for a market category that did not exist when those rules were written. A teleprompter operator profiting six figures is the concrete case; the senators' letter aims at the systemic exposure around it.

The political dimension compounds the operational one. Trump holds broad pardon power, and by asking publicly whether it might extend to a former staffer caught profiting from his position, the senators have converted a regulatory settlement into a test of White House accountability.

The next fixed point is November 23. Whether the White House responds in detail, answers vaguely, or misses the deadline will determine how aggressively Warren and Merkley escalate — and whether Congress moves toward disclosure rules covering prediction-market trading by executive-branch staff.