Former Fed Adviser Covertly Shared Confidential Information With China. Now He Faces Time In Prison

A former Federal Reserve advisor was sentenced to more than three years in prison after lying to investigators about his ties to Chinese intelligence operatives.

John Harold Rogers, 64, was sentenced to 38 months in federal prison for making false statements to federal investigators, the Justice Department officials said. Rogers lied to investigators about the fact that he had been sharing restricted Federal Reserve information with Chinese intelligence operatives.

“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,” said U.S. Attorney Pirro.

“Federal Reserve employees entrusted with America’s most sensitive economic information cannot sell out their country and their colleagues for personal gain and then expect to hide behind a single word,” Pirro added.

Rogers was found guilty in February of making false statements to government investigators. He was also sentenced to 12 months of supervised release.

“Rogers deliberately lied to our investigators to conceal the fact he shared restricted non-public Federal Reserve information with intelligence agents working for China,” said Michael E. Horowitz, Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Rogers, a U.S. citizen who holds a Ph.D in economics, served for decades as a Senior Advisor at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. In that position, he had access to restricted, nonpublic information regarding U.S. monetary policy and the Federal Open Market Committee. From 2010 until 2021, Rogers worked as a senior adviser in the Division of International Finance.

Justice Department officials said that beginning in 2017, 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.” During those meetings, he conveyed Federal Reserve information that Lee had asked for.

Prosecutors said that Rogers printed restricted documents and took them to China. In other instances, he removed the classification markings from materials and emailed them to his personal account before forwarding the sensitive information to a professor at Fudan University, a Chinese state-run institution.

According to the government, Rogers knew that Lee was writing reports for the Chinese government and using the information that Rogers was providing. The result was that 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.

In exchange for the information, Rogers received a variety of benefits including university professorships and substantial financial benefits from Lee and Chinese universities. According to the Taipei Times, Rogers was hired as a part-time professor at a Chinese university, making $150,000 per semester. He also received a research grant of $300,000 bringing his total compensation from the university in 2023 to $450,000.

The Justice Department also indicated that Lee “helped” Rogers with his wife. According to the Taipei Times, Rogers met Liu Yu in Shanghai through a matchmaking service. The couple married in 2018.

Rogers told investigators he “owed everything” to Hummin Lee.