Kalshi has launched an investigation into a series of suspicious trades on its platform that predicted President Trump would select conservative commentator Katie Zacharia to be his next White House press secretary, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. A Kalshi spokeswoman confirmed the probe to the Journal and declined to comment further.
According to a WSJ analysis of publicly available Kalshi data, at least three small but well-timed wagers were placed before the news broke. One $19 bet was placed around 10:43 p.m. ET Thursday evening and is slated to pay out $1,896 once the market closes. Two more bets, for about $74 and $80, were placed around 1:41 p.m. ET Friday, less than an hour before the announcement, and are expected to pay $3,689 and $4,023. As of Oct 9, 2026, Zacharia was seen as having about a 1% likelihood of being named to the post on Kalshi, the Journal reported.
Around 2 p.m. ET on Friday, the New York Times and other news outlets began reporting that Zacharia had been picked. Trump confirmed the appointment that afternoon in a Truth Social post, writing that he is confident Zacharia "will deliver strong results for our Country," per the Journal.
The investigation lands on the same day Kalshi announced it hired former FBI agent Sean Fern to run its first anti-money-laundering team. Fern, who worked as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn after his time at the FBI and helped lead the bureau's 1MDB investigation, told NPR his aim is to build defenses against people trying to use the platform for financial crime. A Kalshi spokeswoman told NPR the hire reflects the company's growth: "We are growing up."
The stakes are rising because the pattern keeps repeating. The Journal noted that Trump's former teleprompter operator, Gabriel Perez, was fired from the White House after netting more than $100,000 on bets tied to the president's speeches, and reached a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in August. After a series of well-timed bets related to the Iran war, the White House previously sent staff a memo warning them against using nonpublic information for private gain.
Analysis: this is the market-integrity question the prediction-markets industry can no longer defer. Earlier this week the CFTC's Division of Market Oversight warned that so-called mention markets, contracts that settle on what a person says or does, carry a heightened manipulation risk, and the press-secretary trade shows why: a political outcome decided by a handful of insiders is almost unforgeable as a fair market when a $19 stake can clear $1,800 on a 1% long shot placed the night before. Kalshi's surveillance caught this one publicly, but every agent-trading platform and API flow built on these venues inherits the same exposure, which is exactly the enforcement surface regulators and new compliance hires like Fern are now staring at. Watch what the investigation finds, and whether the CFTC's pending event-contract rulemaking hardens the line between insurable forecasting and unpoliceable insider markets.