Former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the Never-Trump Republican who helped lead the partisan January 6 committee, is under a federal review after placing bets on prediction-market contracts tied to the preemptive pardon he later received from Joe Biden.
According to Politico, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is examining trades a Kalshi account linked to Kinzinger made in December 2024 and January 2025. Kalshi is conducting its own review of the same activity.
Three people familiar with the matter told Politico the probe covers contracts on whether Kinzinger himself would receive a presidential pardon and whether Biden would issue preemptive pardons before leaving office.
Kinzinger, who left Congress in 2023, was a private citizen when he placed the bets. In Biden’s final hours in January 2025, the then-president issued a preemptive pardon covering Kinzinger and other members of the House select committee that investigated January 6, the same panel The Gateway Pundit has repeatedly documented for its one-sided hearings and treatment of Trump supporters.
CNN reported that Kinzinger traded less than $1,000 on the two pardon-related markets. Screenshots he shared show he wagered a total of $669 and netted $823.
He told CNN he also placed roughly two dozen other political bets around the same time and mostly lost money.
Kinzinger denied insider trading. “It was a dumb bet, to bet on myself,” he told CNN. “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.”
He insisted he had no advance knowledge: “At no point, ever, had I had a conversation with anybody in the know about pardons (or) whether I’d get pardoned. Certainly, nobody in the White House or anybody that would know anything.”
He told Politico he had read Kalshi’s rules and believed they only barred users who worked for the relevant agency, could influence the outcome, or held non-public information. Kalshi’s rules also bar users from betting on contracts in which they are direct participants.
CNN reported that Kalshi flagged the trades during a broader look at suspicious activity, referred them to the CFTC, and tried to reach Kinzinger. He said neither the agency nor the platform has contacted him.
Months after Kinzinger made his pardon bets, he became a public critic of political prediction markets.
According to reporting on the investigation, Kinzinger wrote in November 2025 that platforms such as Kalshi represented a “corruption time bomb,” warning that government officials and political insiders could potentially profit from privileged information.
Kinzinger argues there is no contradiction because he says he had no privileged information when he made his own trades.
He has also suggested that the new scrutiny may be retaliation for his criticism of Kalshi, an allegation for which no public evidence has been presented.
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