The Justice Department indicted a U.S. Army special forces soldier this week for using classified military intelligence to profit on a prediction market, and the president compared it to a baseball player betting on his own team.
Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, 38, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, helped plan and execute "Operation Absolute Resolve," the predawn raid on January 3 in Caracas, Venezuela that captured Nicolás Maduro. Starting December 26, 2025, while holding top-secret knowledge of the operation, Van Dyke opened a Polymarket account and placed 13 bets totaling $33,034 on Venezuela- and Maduro-related contracts. When the raid succeeded, the market paid out. His take: $409,881.
Federal prosecutors charged Van Dyke with three counts of violating the Commodity Exchange Act, wire fraud, and an unlawful monetary transaction. If convicted on all counts, he faces decades in prison. Prosecutors say he also tried to delete his account after online analysts flagged the unusually profitable bets, claiming he had lost access to his email.
Who Owns the Platform
Donald Trump Jr. joined Polymarket's advisory board last year. His venture capital fund has invested an undisclosed amount in the company. Trump Jr. also advises Kalshi, a competing prediction market. When a government official with classified military knowledge places winning bets on a platform where the president's son sits as an adviser, the conflict of interest writes itself.
Pete Rose Was Not Hiding a Classified Military Operation
When asked about the indictment Thursday, Trump wanted to know one thing first: did Van Dyke bet for or against Maduro's capture? Told the soldier had predicted Maduro's fall, Trump invoked Pete Rose, the baseball manager banned from the sport for betting on his own team's games.
"That's like Pete Rose betting on his own team," Trump said. "Now, if he bet against his team, that would be no good. But he bet on his own team. I'll look into it."
The comparison breaks down immediately. Rose bet on whether his team would win or lose, information that was ambiguous and open to every bettor. Van Dyke bet on an outcome he knew with certainty because the operation was classified. Every other Polymarket user was in the dark. Van Dyke was not betting on his country the way Rose bet on his club. He was converting a classified secret into cash.
Van Dyke also did not just bet on the raid's success. He bet that U.S. forces would be present inside Venezuela by the end of January, and that Trump would invoke war powers against the country. Those are not sports-style outcome wagers. Those are classified operational details sold to a prediction market.
The Broader Pattern
Two weeks before the indictment, the White House warned staff not to engage in insider trading on prediction markets. That warning did not come from nowhere. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has publicly raised the possibility that officials higher up than one soldier may be enriching themselves through nonpublic information. A CNN report from last month found a trader who won 93 percent of their bets on Iran-related markets and netted nearly $1 million, with independent analysts describing the results as "strong signaling of insider activity."
No hard evidence of higher-level wrongdoing has emerged. But the president has now answered the question of whether he would be troubled by it. His answer was Pete Rose. His son profits from the platform where it happened.
Browse the resistance collection at impeachtrump.earth.
Sources: U.S. Department of Justice | CNN Politics | CNBC | NPR | Washington Post | CBS News
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