A White House teleprompter operator is under federal investigation for making roughly $100,000 betting on what President Trump would say in his speeches — and the press corps is treating it like the crime of the century. Meanwhile, members of Congress legally trade stocks on insider information every single day and nobody blinks.

Gabriel Perez, a deputy assistant to the president who has run Trump's teleprompter since 2016, allegedly used his advance access to prepared remarks to place bets on Kalshi's "mention markets," where users wager on whether specific words or phrases will appear in public speeches. Kalshi's surveillance team flagged the suspicious trades and referred them to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in March. The company froze roughly $90,000 in Perez's profits and banned him from the platform, NPR reported.

Perez, who earns $175,000 a year in his White House role, bet on more than a dozen speeches over three months, including the State of the Union address, Trump's January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and a December primetime address, according to UPI and the New York Post.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Thursday that Perez has been placed on unpaid administrative leave. She said Trump called the situation a "disgrace" and declared that "this individual will no longer be here."

The Boston Globe and NPR both framed this as the latest sign that prediction markets are "ripe" with manipulation. NPR called it "the first time someone inside the White House has been investigated for allegedly abusing that access for prediction market profits." What neither outlet saw fit to mention: the far more lucrative and perfectly legal insider trading that happens every day on Capitol Hill.

Here is the double standard. Perez faces federal investigation, frozen assets, and termination for betting on speech words. Members of Congress, meanwhile, are exempt from the insider trading laws that apply to every other American. The STOCK Act of 2012 was supposed to close that loophole, but enforcement has been virtually nonexistent. Lawmakers sit in classified briefings on defense contracts, pharmaceutical regulations, and tech antitrust action — then buy or sell stock in the affected companies before the public knows a thing. No frozen assets. No CFTC referrals. No press conferences.

NPR noted that the White House sent a memo to staff in March warning that using nonpublic government information on prediction markets "is a very serious offence and will not be tolerated." The memo came just weeks before federal prosecutors charged an Army Special Forces soldier with using classified information about the raid capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to win approximately $409,000 on Polymarket, the New York Post reported.

No one is defending Perez. He broke the rules and he is facing the consequences. But the selective outrage tells you everything about who the system protects. A teleprompter operator making side bets on speech content draws federal enforcement and wall-to-wall coverage. A senator trading defense stocks after a classified briefing? That is just Tuesday in Washington.

The CFTC declined to confirm or deny the investigation. It remains unclear whether the Department of Justice is also examining the case.