John Harold Rogers, a onetime senior adviser at the Federal Reserve Board, is headed to federal prison for 38 months, followed by 12 months of supervised release, after a jury found he lied about sharing restricted Fed information with alleged Chinese intelligence operatives. Jurors in his February trial delivered a split verdict, clearing him of conspiracy to commit economic espionage while convicting him on the false-statements charge. Rogers worked in the Fed’s Division of International Finance from 2010 through 2021.
Sentence and official statements
According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the sentence was handed down on July 15 after jurors deliberated for two days, and prosecutors had pushed for a 60-month prison term, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. The release quoted U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro: "John Rogers spent years secretly funneling sensitive Federal Reserve information to Chinese spies, then looked investigators in the eye and lied about it." The statement also carried comments from the Federal Reserve inspector general and the FBI, both stressing the national-security risks they said his conduct created.
Prosecutors' portrait of the alleged scheme
Prosecutors told jurors that Rogers began a clandestine relationship in 2017 with an alleged Chinese intelligence operative named Hummin Lee and passed along restricted Fed materials during hotel-room meetings in China, arranged under the cover of teaching academic "classes," as reported by The Washington Post. In trial coverage and court filings, prosecutors accused Rogers of printing restricted briefing books, stripping classification markings, and emailing sensitive documents to his personal account before traveling, then handing over materials to academic contacts overseas. A federal jury ultimately acquitted him of the economic-espionage conspiracy but found him guilty of making false statements, Bloomberg Law reported.
Why officials said the information mattered
The Justice Department said in its filings that Rogers understood advance knowledge of Federal Reserve interest-rate decisions could let Beijing reap huge profits by trading roughly $1.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities, and that he received university roles and other financial perks tied to his contacts, according to the Justice Department. Federal investigators and the Fed Office of Inspector General said Rogers repeatedly broke the Board’s information-security rules by removing and sharing restricted, nonpublic materials.
Legal note
Conspiracy to commit economic espionage can carry a maximum sentence of 15 years, while making false statements carries up to five years under federal law, as set out in 18 U.S.C. § 1831 and 18 U.S.C. § 1001. The split verdict in Rogers’s trial, an acquittal on the espionage conspiracy and a conviction for false statements, helped shape both the prosecution’s sentencing request and the punishment the judge ultimately imposed.
