The Justice Department has reportedly opened a criminal probe into former Rep.
George Santos over allegations that he reaped tens of thousands of dollars through an insider trading scheme on the online prediction market Kalshi.
According to Just The News, the investigation centers on a sequence of events surrounding President Donald Trump's "State of the Union" address, after Santos publicly claimed on X in February that he would be in attendance. At the time, Kalshi users were wagering on which political figures would appear at the speech, and Santos' post caused the odds of his attendance to spike dramatically.
During the address, however, Santos posted on X that he was stranded at an airport, and the odds on Kalshi that he would attend collapsed. NPR reported, citing anonymous sources, that Santos had already placed bets on the platform predicting he would not attend the speech, positioning himself to profit from the market swing.
Kalshi flagged the trading activity, froze Santos' account, and referred the matter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department, those sources said. Both agencies reportedly launched investigations into Santos' conduct, raising fresh legal questions for the disgraced lawmaker.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department did not respond to NPR's requests for comment, and Kalshi likewise declined to comment. Santos told NPR he was unaware of any investigation and would neither confirm nor deny having a Kalshi account.
Santos received a 7-year prison sentence for fraud that began in July 2025, a punishment many on the right viewed as excessive compared with leniency often shown to politically connected liberals. President Trump commuted his sentence the following October, emphasizing that "George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated."
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