Key Points
- The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating trades linked to Adam Kinzinger's Kalshi account from December 2024 and January 2025, according to Politico.
- One of the contracts involved the potential for Kinzinger to receive a presidential pardon.
- Kalshi prohibits users from betting on contracts in which they are directly involved.
The CFTC is looking into former Illinois Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger regarding trades made on the prediction market Kalshi that are associated with the presidential pardon he received from President Joe Biden, as reported by Politico, citing sources familiar with the situation.
These trades occurred through a Kalshi account attributed to Kinzinger during December 2024 and January 2025. He disclosed to the publication that he had placed a bet on whether he would personally receive a pardon, as well as on a separate bet regarding whether Biden would grant preemptive pardons before leaving office.
Biden did indeed issue such pardons in the final hours of his administration in January 2025, preemptively pardoning Kinzinger and other members of the House select committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol riot. Donald Trump, who was inaugurated shortly after the pardons were signed, had previously called for the imprisonment of the committee's members.
Kinzinger's financial involvement was minor; he shared screenshots indicating he earned $823 from the trades, claiming to have made about 25 trades during that period, most of which resulted in losses.
He refutes any allegations of misconduct, stating that he had been out of office for two years when he made the bets, was not a congressman or a candidate at the time, and possessed no insider knowledge. He emphasized that he had reviewed Kalshi's regulations and understood them to prevent trading on contracts where a user is a direct participant or possesses confidential information, asserting he had never discussed pardons with anyone.
Kalshi prohibits users from engaging in trades on contracts in which they are directly involved, while the CFTC forbids the utilization of nonpublic material information in regulated markets. Kalshi is also examining these transactions. Both the commission and Kalshi declined to comment to Politico, and Kinzinger stated that neither entity had reached out to him regarding the investigation.
Kalshi has previously taken action in similar situations. In April, the platform suspended three congressional candidates for betting on their own election outcomes. Moreover, it froze the account of former Representative George Santos and referred him to the CFTC and the Justice Department due to trades made against his own attendance at the State of the Union, despite publicly claiming he would attend, ultimately banning him for life in late August.
A "Corruption Time Bomb"
Kinzinger has been critical of the platform in the past. In a Substack post last November, he expressed concerns regarding markets on the actions of individual Congress members, citing contracts that speculated on which senator would first visit Syria and how members would vote on releasing Epstein-related documents. He described such markets as "a corruption time bomb," arguing that "a platform that allows insiders (and legislators) to gamble on their own actions poses a threat to democracy." He now states that he is generally satisfied with the improvements in Kalshi's oversight processes.
A vocal critic of Trump, Kinzinger has had public disagreements with the former president regarding foreign policy and Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020. In a post on Truth Social in March 2025, Trump labeled the pardons as "void" and stated that the recipients were "subject to investigation at the highest level." The White House has not commented on this matter to Politico.
This investigation occurs as the CFTC intensifies its scrutiny of the prediction market sector. Recently, staff cautioned exchanges that contracts based on the actions or words of specific individuals should be considered vulnerable to manipulation, following a month after the agency fined a former White House teleprompter operator $172,000 for trades involving presidential mention markets.