The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating former Representative Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican turned Trump critic, over prediction market trades tied to the preemptive pardon he received from President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Politico reported on Tuesday, citing three people with knowledge of the matter.
The trades ran through a Kalshi account linked to Mr. Kinzinger in December 2024 and January 2025. He told Politico he had wagered on one contract that settled on whether he would personally receive a pardon, and on a second asking whether Mr. Biden would hand out preemptive pardons before leaving office.
Mr. Biden did so in his final hours in January 2025, pardoning Mr. Kinzinger and other members of the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Mr. Trump, sworn in soon after the pardons were signed, had called for the committee’s members to be jailed. In a Truth Social post in March 2025, he called the pardons “void” and said the recipients were “subject to investigation at the highest level.” The White House declined to comment to Politico.
The money was small. Mr. Kinzinger gave Politico screenshots showing he made $823 on the trades, and said he placed around 25 in all, most of them losers.
He denies any wrongdoing. He had been out of office for two years when he placed the bets, he said, was neither a congressman nor a candidate, and had “no inside information.” He said he had read Kalshi’s rules first and understood them to bar trading where a user works for the agency involved, can sway the outcome or holds non-public information, and that he had never discussed the pardons with anyone.
Kalshi’s rules do prohibit users from betting on contracts in which they are direct participants, and the CFTC bars trading on material nonpublic information in the markets it oversees. The exchange is reviewing the transactions on its own, Politico reported. Both the agency and Kalshi declined to comment, and Mr. Kinzinger said neither had contacted him about an investigation.
Kalshi has handled like cases. It suspended three congressional candidates in April over bets on their own races. It froze former Representative George Santos’s account over trades against his own attendance at the State of the Union address while he was publicly saying he would attend, referred him to the CFTC and the Justice Department, then banned him for life in late August.
Mr. Kinzinger has also been a critic of the platform’s. In a Substack post last November he wrote against markets on the conduct of individual members of Congress, pointing to contracts on which senator would first visit Syria and on how each member would vote on releasing the Epstein files. He called such markets “a corruption time bomb” and wrote that “a platform that lets insiders (and legislators) gamble on their own behavior is a threat to democracy.” He now says he is broadly satisfied with how Kalshi’s screening has developed.
The inquiry arrives as the CFTC tightens its grip on the sector. Staff warned exchanges last week that contracts settling on the words or conduct of a named individual should be presumed open to manipulation. A month earlier, the agency fined a former White House teleprompter operator $172,000 over trades on markets tied to what the president would say.