(Ken Silva, Headline USA) A former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was sentenced to 38 months in prison on Wednesday for conspiring to steal trade secrets for the People’s Republic of China.
The ex-Fed official, John Harold Rogers, 63, of Vienna, Virginia, was arrested in January 2025. A jury found him guilty in February of this year after deliberating for two days.
According to the Justice Department, Rogers a U.S. citizen with a Ph.D. in economics, worked as a senior adviser in the Federal Reserve’s Division of International Finance from 2010 until 2021—giving him access to confidential financial information.
The DOJ alleged that Rogers shared that information with Chinese intelligence agents. Specifically, Rogers gave them info that could allow China to manipulate the U.S. market, in a manner similar to insider trading, according to the DOJ.
“Rogers developed a clandestine relationship with Hummin Lee, a Chinese intelligence operative, whom he met at a conference in China. Over the following years, Rogers met Lee and associates in hotel rooms in China under the guise of teaching academic ‘classes,’ using the sessions to convey Federal Reserve information that Lee had specifically tasked him to collect,” the DOJ said in a press release.
“Rogers printed restricted documents to bring on a trip 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,” the DOJ said.
“Rogers understood that Lee was writing reports for the Chinese government using the information he provided, and knew China could use advance knowledge of Federal Reserve interest rate decisions to generate enormous profits trading its roughly $1.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities.”
Rogers was paid about $450,000 as a part-time professor at a Chinese university, the DOJ added.
Rogers was interviewed in 2020 by the Office of the Inspector General for the Federal Reserve Board about his dealings with China. During that interview, he allegedly lied about his accessing and passage of sensitive information and his associations with his co-conspirators.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
