Former Federal Reserve official gets 38 months in prison in espionage case

A former senior adviser at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was sentenced to 38 months in federal prison for lying to investigators about sharing restricted Fed information with Chinese intelligence operatives, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro announced.

John Harold Rogers, 64, of Vienna, Virginia, was sentenced in U.S. District Court after a federal jury, following two days of deliberation, found him guilty on Feb. 3 of making false statements to investigators from the Office of Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“John Rogers spent years secretly funneling sensitive Federal Reserve information to Chinese spies, then looked investigators in the eye and lied about it,” Pirro said. “And when that wasn’t enough, he lied again under oath at trial.”

Judge Dabney Friedrich ordered Rogers to serve 12 months of supervised release in addition to the prison term. Federal prosecutors had sought a 60-month sentence.

Michael E. Horowitz, inspector general for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said Rogers “deliberately lied” to investigators to conceal that he had shared restricted, nonpublic Federal Reserve information with intelligence agents working for China. FBI Special Agent in Charge Daniel Wierzbicki of the Washington Field Office’s Counterintelligence and Cyber Division said Rogers violated Federal Reserve information security policies by sending sensitive, nonpublic information to himself while in China and to others affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, then lied to federal agents about those disclosures.

According to court papers, Rogers, who holds a Ph.D. in economics, spent decades as a senior adviser at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, including in the Division of International Finance from 2010 to 2021, where he had access to restricted, nonpublic information about monetary policy and the Federal Open Market Committee. Beginning in 2017, he developed a clandestine relationship with Hummin Lee, a Chinese intelligence operative he met at a conference in China. According to court papers, Rogers later met Lee and his associates in hotel rooms in China under the guise of teaching academic “classes,” where he conveyed Federal Reserve information Lee had specifically tasked him to collect.

Court papers state that Rogers printed restricted documents before traveling to China, stripped classification markings from materials before emailing them to his personal account, and forwarded sensitive information to a professor at Fudan University, a Chinese state-run institution, days before meeting Lee. According to prosecutors, Rogers understood Lee was using the information to write reports for the Chinese government and knew China could exploit advance knowledge of Federal Reserve interest rate decisions to generate enormous profits trading its roughly $1.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities. In exchange, Rogers received help with his new wife, university professorships and substantial financial benefits from Lee and Chinese universities. Rogers also told investigators he “owed everything” to Lee, according to court records.

During a Feb. 4, 2020, interview with investigators from the Federal Reserve’s Office of Inspector General, Rogers was asked whether he had ever shared restricted Federal Reserve information outside the Board. According to court papers, he responded, “Never.”

The case was investigated by the FBI Washington Field Office and the Federal Reserve Board Office of Inspector General.