Financial Regulator Investigates Adam Kinzinger Over Kalshi Trading

A top federal financial regulator is investigating former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger — an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump — for prediction market trades he made tied to his pardon by former President Joe Biden, according to three people with knowledge of the probe.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a derivatives regulator that has been asserting a large role in prediction market oversight, has been looking at trades that a Kalshi account linked to Kinzinger made in December 2024 and January 2025, said the people, granted anonymity to discuss matters candidly. Kalshi, which touts its monitoring of insider trading on political events, has also been reviewing the transactions, said the people.

Kinzinger retired from Congress in 2023. In January 2025, in Biden’s final hours as president, he preemptively pardoned Kinzinger and other members of the House select committee that had investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol after Trump had called for them to be jailed.

In a statement, Kinzinger said he made trades related to his presidential pardon but added that they were in accordance with what he perceived to be Kalshi’s rules at the time. He also said he had no inside information related to whether he would receive a pardon.

“I was not a congressman or candidate, and had been out of office for two years, and had no inside information,” Kinzinger said.

“I had read [the] rules of Kalshi before making wagers, and general prohibitions were that you could not work for a source agency, … influence its outcome, or have non-public information about it,” he added. “I felt confident in this because I had never had a conversation with anyone about [the pardons], much less anyone anywhere near the White House.”

Kinzinger said in an interview that he placed wagers on a contract on whether he would receive a presidential pardon and a separate contract on whether Biden would issue preemptive pardons toward the end of his term.

According to screenshots provided by Kinzinger, he made $823 on the trades. He said he also made “25 or so” total trades at the time and mostly lost money.

The CFTC and Kalshi declined to comment. Kinzinger said he has not been contacted by the agency or the prediction market platform about the investigation.

Kinzinger, who represented Illinois in the House, has clashed with Trump on a number of issues, including his foreign policy and Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

In a March 2025 Truth Social post, Trump called the pardons of Kinzinger and his colleagues “void” and said the recipients are “subject to investigation at the highest level.” The White House declined to comment.

Kalshi prohibits users from making bets on contracts in which they are direct participants. The CFTC, which oversees prediction markets such as Kalshi, bans insider trading, or using material nonpublic information to gain an edge on the markets it regulates.

Kinzinger has also been a vocal critic of Kalshi in the past, calling the platform a “corruption time bomb” in a November 2025 Substack post. He said on Tuesday that he has “generally been pleased with how Kalshi has begun screening.”

Kalshi has banned individuals it says made insider trades or refused to cooperate with investigations. In April, the company suspended three congressional candidates for betting on their own races. In late August, the platform issued a lifetime ban against former New York Republican Rep. George Santos, over trades he allegedly made on whether he would attend the State of the Union.