A former senior advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was sentenced to over three years in prison for lying to federal investigators about sharing restricted central-bank information with Chinese intelligence operatives.
Marco Bello | Reuters
A former senior advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was sentenced to over three years in prison for lying to federal investigators about sharing restricted central-bank information with Chinese intelligence operatives, according to the Justice Department.
John Harold Rogers, 64, was found guilty in February of making false statements to investigators when he denied sharing restricted information on monetary policy, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a statement Wednesday. The same jury acquitted him of the more serious charge of conspiracy to commit economic espionage.
“John Rogers spent years secretly funneling sensitive Federal Reserve information to Chinese spies, then looked investigators in the eye and lied about it. And when that wasn’t enough, he lied again under oath at trial,” Pirro said.
The sentencing comes at a time when the Trump administration has intensified its pursuit of alleged economic espionage by Beijing.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich also ordered Rogers to serve additional 12 months of supervised release. Defense lawyers had asked for no additional jail time beyond the roughly 18 months he had already spent in custody, which will be credited toward his sentence.
Rogers, a U.S. citizen who holds a Ph.D in economics, worked as a senior advisor for the Federal Reserve Board’s division of international finance from 2010 to 2021, with access to nonpublic material on monetary policy and Federal Open Market Committee deliberations.
Prosecutors argued that sharing advance knowledge of Fed interest-rate decisions could have allowed Beijing to generate “enormous profits” from trading its roughly $1.5 trillion in U.S. Treasurys, according to the Justice Department.
Rogers had allegedly begun a clandestine relationship in 2017 with Hummin Lee, a Chinese intelligence operative he met at a conference in China, and conveyed Fed information during meetings in Chinese hotel rooms held under the guise of teaching academic classes.
He printed restricted documents before traveling to China, emailing materials to his personal account after stripping classification markings, and forwarded sensitive information to a professor at Fudan University, the Justice department release said. In exchange, he received university professorships and financial benefits, prosecutors said.
Asked directly in a February 2020 inspector general interview whether he had ever shared restricted Fed information outside the board, Rogers answered “never,” according to the Justice Department.
Chinese ministry of foreign affairs did not respond to CNBC’s request for comments.
Correction: The lead image on this story has been updated. A previous image displayed within the article depicted the wrong person in connection with this news.
