WHITE HOUSE TELEPROMPTER CLEARED $107,000 BETTING ON KALSHI

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley sent a letter to White House counsel Will Scharf asking what the administration has done in the four months since its teleprompter operator got caught running the easiest trade in America. Their answer, as they tell it, is that the only publicly known step was circulating a warning memo, which the senators argue will not fix what they call a culture of corruption and greed. The case: Gabriel Perez, Trump's teleprompter guy since 2016, bet on Kalshi's "Mentions" markets, where you wager on whether a word shows up in a speech. He had the speech. He was holding it. Investigators found bets across more than a dozen speeches over three months, including the State of the Union and Davos, and more than $107,000 in profit. The best detail is that he bailed on positions mid-speech when Trump skipped a chunk of script. He wasn't just reading the future, he was watching it get edited live. Kalshi's own surveillance flagged him and referred it to the CFTC, which hit him with a $65,000 penalty, took the profits back, and banned him from trading for three years. Fair warning on the framing: this is a Democratic press release, and the White House hasn't publicly laid out its side. The senators want to know if other staff placed similar bets, whether anyone got training, and whether anybody called the CFTC or DOJ.

Why you should give a shit: Perez ate a $173,000 bill and a three-year ban while the building that writes the speeches got a memo, and in January Warren takes the Banking gavel and can start demanding better answers than that.