Federal regulators are examining Adam Kinzinger’s Kalshi bets that he would receive a Biden pardon, a move that clashes with his later warning that prediction markets invite corruption.
Career enforcement officials at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are looking into former Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s trades on the prediction platform Kalshi tied to a pardon he later received from then-President Joe Biden, CNN reported citing two sources familiar with the matter.
Kinzinger, a Republican and prominent Trump critic who left Congress and was a private citizen at the time, placed the wagers in late 2024 and early 2025. He bet that Biden would pardon him. Biden did so in the final hours of his presidency, along with other members of the House committee that investigated efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Kalshi itself uncovered the trades during a broader review of “suspicious” activity and flagged them to the CFTC. The platform tried to reach Kinzinger; he did not respond, according to a source described in the reporting. Both the CFTC and Kalshi declined to comment.
The dollar amounts were small. Kinzinger traded less than $1,000 across two pardon-related Kalshi markets. Screenshots he later shared showed a total wager of $669 and a net gain of $823. Those two trades were among a few dozen political bets he placed on the platform.
In an interview, Kinzinger acknowledged the trades and said he reviewed Kalshi’s rules beforehand. He said he believed the activity did not violate those rules and that he never held insider information about the pardons.
He told CNN:
"It was a dumb bet, to bet on myself,"
He added:
"Looking back, I’m like, yeah, I wish I’d have skipped it. But everything I saw at the time was like, you’re within your right to bet on this."
On contact with anyone who might have known the outcome in advance, Kinzinger was direct:
"At no point, ever, had I had a conversation with anybody in the know about pardons (or) whether I’d get pardoned,"
And:
"Certainly, nobody in the White House or anybody that would know anything."
He also said he has not heard from any government investigators and never heard from Kalshi. No charges, fines, or formal CFTC findings against him appear in the available reporting. The probe remains an inquiry described by people familiar with it, not a completed enforcement case.
In a November 2025 Substack post, Kinzinger went after the industry he had used. He wrote that Kalshi and other prediction sites are a “corruption time bomb” and a “threat to democracy” because politicians can profit from insider knowledge.
That sequence is plain on the record: he placed the pardon-related bets while out of office, collected a modest profit after Biden’s preemptive clemency, then publicly framed the same style of market as a systemic risk. Biden had argued the preemptive pardons were needed to shield the lawmakers from possible retaliation by the incoming Trump administration. Readers can weigh that justification against later Trump clemency actions that have drawn their own political fights.
Politico had previously reported the CFTC inquiry into Kinzinger and described it as the first publicly known federal probe into pardon markets on prediction sites. Career CFTC enforcement officials began scrutinizing Biden pardon markets on both Kalshi and Polymarket after press reports raised questions about potential insider activity. One linked report noted a Polymarket trader who made $300,000 betting on Biden’s pardons.
The Kinzinger matter sits inside a wider enforcement push. The CFTC recently settled a case with a former Trump White House teleprompter operator for “unlawful” bets on Kalshi about what Trump would say in speeches. The agency also settled with former Rep. George Santos over improper trades about whether he would attend the State of the Union.
Kalshi, for its part, last month fined several political candidates for betting on their own campaigns in violation of the company’s insider-trading rules. Sources familiar with Kalshi’s practice say the firm often tries to resolve smaller matters internally when the sums are modest and the trader cooperates.
Prediction platforms have exploded in popularity this year and now see billions of dollars in weekly trading volume. A bipartisan coalition of 44 states has urged the CFTC to rein in the platforms. Dozens of lawmakers on Capitol Hill are backing legislation that would stiffen penalties against insider trading on these markets.
Presidential clemency itself remains a flashpoint. Debates continue over how far a pardon reaches when new questions arise, a tension also visible when Comer warned Fauci that Biden’s blanket pardon would not shield false testimony under oath.
Kinzinger is a CNN contributor. CNN has maintained a partnership with Kalshi since December and uses the platform’s data to cover major events. The network’s own editorial employees are not permitted to use prediction markets. That separation does not erase the optics of a contributor’s trades becoming the subject of a regulator’s review while the network both employs him and partners with the exchange.
Other recent clemency stories show how quickly pardon politics can rebound on the people involved. Trump has issued multiple rounds of relief in emissions and corruption cases, and he has also criticized a pardoned congressman while backing a Republican challenger. Separate commutations, including one for a Philadelphia union boss citing a spouse’s terminal illness, keep the same accountability questions in front of voters.
What remains unsettled in Kinzinger’s case is the formal status of the CFTC work, whether it is a preliminary look, a full investigation, or something short of an enforcement action, and whether any subpoena or charging paper will ever name him. The reporting does not show a finding that he possessed or used insider information. It does show the trades, the profit, the self-described “dumb bet,” the later lecture about corruption, and a federal regulator now examining the paper trail.
Further Trump clemency rounds, including pardons for emissions convicts and other contested grants of mercy, ensure the public will keep comparing who gets relief, who profits around it, and who faces scrutiny afterward.
Betting on your own pardon and then preaching about prediction-market corruption is a hard sell to taxpayers who expect one standard for political insiders.
