CFTC investigates Kinzinger’s Kalshi bets on his Biden pardon

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating former Representative Adam Kinzinger over prediction-market trades connected to the presidential pardon he received from Joe Biden, Politico reported. A Kalshi account linked to Kinzinger made the transactions in December 2024 and January 2025, and the platform is separately reviewing them.

Kinzinger said he placed bets on a contract asking whether he personally would receive a pardon and another on whether Biden would issue preemptive pardons before leaving office. Screenshots he provided showed a profit of $823 on the trades; he said he made about 25 trades overall and mostly lost money.

He denied wrongdoing, saying he had no inside information, had never discussed the pardons with anyone and believed the trades complied with Kalshi’s rules at the time. Kinzinger said he had left Congress two years earlier and was neither a member of Congress nor a candidate when he traded. He also said neither the CFTC nor Kalshi had contacted him about the inquiry.

Kalshi’s rules bar users from trading contracts in which they are direct participants. The company also prohibits trading where a user has direct or indirect influence over an outcome, while the CFTC prohibits the use of material nonpublic information on markets it regulates. Kalshi and the CFTC declined to comment to Politico.

Biden issued the pardons in his final hours as president in January 2025, covering Kinzinger and other members of the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Donald Trump, who had called for the committee members to be jailed, later described the pardons as “void” and said their recipients were subject to investigation.

Kinzinger, a Republican who retired from Congress in 2023, had previously criticised markets on the conduct of individual lawmakers. In a Substack post last November, he called arrangements that let insiders and legislators gamble on their own behaviour “a corruption time bomb” and described the platform as “a threat to democracy.” He said he is now broadly pleased with the way Kalshi’s screening procedures have developed.

The inquiry comes as the CFTC has pressed its authority over prediction markets. KalshiEX is a CFTC-designated contract market, and the agency says it has full authority under the Commodity Exchange Act to police illegal trading on such venues, while exchanges must keep audit trails, conduct surveillance and enforce their own restrictions.

In an enforcement advisory issued Feb. 25, the CFTC cited cases involving a political candidate who traded on his own candidacy and a YouTube-channel editor who likely had advance knowledge of videos before they were posted. Kalshi imposed a five-year suspension and a roughly $2,250 penalty in the candidate case, and a two-year suspension with a roughly $20,400 penalty in the YouTube matter.

The agency separately warned that contracts determined by the words or conduct of a named person should be presumed vulnerable to manipulation. As reported in August, the CFTC also ordered a former White House teleprompter operator to repay profits and pay a penalty over trades on markets tied to words the president might use.

Kalshi suspended three congressional candidates in April over bets on their own races. It also froze former Representative George Santos’s account, referred him to the CFTC and Justice Department over trades involving his attendance at the State of the Union, and later banned him from the platform for life.