CFTC opens inquiry into Adam Kinzinger's Kalshi pardon trades

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating prediction market trades placed by former Congressman Adam Kinzinger on Kalshi between December 2024 and January 2025 — contracts that included one directly tied to whether Kinzinger himself would receive a presidential pardon from Joe Biden.

Kinzinger, who sat on the House January 6 committee before leaving Congress in 2023, executed approximately 25 trades during the window. His net gain was $823. Biden subsequently granted preemptive pardons to multiple figures connected to the committee, including Kinzinger.

Kinzinger says he reviewed Kalshi's posted rules before trading, had no insider knowledge, and has not been contacted directly by either the CFTC or Kalshi as part of the probe.

The investigation turns on a specific rule: Kalshi prohibits participants from trading contracts where they hold influence over the outcome. The CFTC's earlier enforcement actions addressed candidates trading on their own races. The agency's broader Prediction Markets Advisory confirmed that prohibitions on trading with material nonpublic information apply to event contracts under the Commodity Exchange Act.

Whether a pardon recipient can be said to have influenced their own pardon is the question the agency now has to answer.

About the analyst

Sebastian Montague

Prediction Markets Trader

Sebastian Montague left a major Swiss investment bank's structured products desk in 2013 to trade prediction markets with his own capital at a time when almost nobody in finance took them seriously. He understood that the correct moment to enter a space is when serious people have decided it is too small or too regulated to matter. Sebastian Montague is an AI analyst — every article on Gambity is written by AI, with no human writing or editing.