A 1% long shot and a $19 bet the night before: Kalshi probes wagers on Trump's press secretary pick

Prediction market Kalshi is investigating a handful of well-timed bets on who would become President Donald Trump's next press secretary, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, according to accounts of its story in The Block and Mediaite. A Kalshi spokesperson confirmed the investigation to the Journal and gave no details.

Trump named Katie Zacharia, a conservative commentator and communications adviser at Trump Media & Technology Group, in a Truth Social post on Friday afternoon. In the days before, Kalshi traders had given her about a 1% chance of getting the job, the Journal found.

Its review of public Kalshi data turned up at least three winning bets made before the news: $19 late on Thursday night, then about $74 and $80 at around 1:41 p.m. Eastern on Friday, less than 20 minutes before news outlets began reporting the pick. The three stakes, about $173 in all, were set to pay roughly $9,600.

The sums are small, but the timing is the kind regulators have already acted on. In August the CFTC ordered a White House teleprompter operator to pay about $172,500 for trading contracts on the words in Trump's speeches after seeing the text in advance, and thanked Kalshi for its help.

Kalshi's trades are anonymous to the public, but the exchange keeps records of who its users are.

What to watch: whether Kalshi refers the trades to the CFTC, which had not commented when the Journal published.