On Wednesday, July 15, Judge Dabney Friedrich of the United States Federal District Court sentenced former senior advisor to the Federal Reserve, John Harold Rogers, to 38 months in prison with an additional 12 months of supervised release for providing confidential information to Chinese intelligence agents and making false statements to federal investigators.
According to an announcement on the official website of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesday, 64-year-old Rogers was found guilty of making false statements to investigators and falsely claiming not to have shared monetary policy information after a jury trial on February 3.
Prosecutor Jeanine Pirro, who led the case, emphasized in the DOJ statement that Rogers had been secretly transmitting sensitive Federal Reserve information to Chinese spies for years, and had blatantly lied to investigators when questioned, even committing perjury during courtroom testimony.
She stressed that Federal Reserve employees entrusted with core US economic secrets should not betray their country and colleagues for personal gain.
Court documents revealed that Rogers, a resident of Vienna, Virginia, held a Ph.D. in economics and worked as a senior advisor at the Division of International Finance of the Federal Reserve from 2010 to 2021, where he had access to confidential information related to monetary policy and the Federal Open Market Committee.
The prosecution stated that since 2017, Rogers had established a secret connection with Chinese intelligence agent Hummin Lee, meeting Lee and his associates in hotel rooms during his academic lecture trips to China and providing Federal Reserve-related information as instructed.
Rogers had taken printed confidential documents to China, removed the classified labels, and forwarded them to his personal email, and had also transmitted sensitive information to a professor at Fudan University in China before meetings with Lee.
The prosecution indicated that Rogers was well aware that Lee would use this information to write reports for the Chinese government, gaining insights into Federal Reserve interest rate decisions and profiting from trading around $1.5 trillion in US Treasury bonds.
In return, Rogers received substantial economic benefits and secured a university teaching position and other conveniences through Hummin Lee and Chinese universities. He had even admitted to investigators that he owed everything to Lee.
In February 2020, Rogers was directly asked by investigators from the Office of Inspector General of the Federal Reserve if he had shared restricted information with external parties, to which he falsely replied that he had never done so.
The case was jointly investigated by the FBI’s Washington Field Office and the Office of Inspector General of the Federal Reserve, prosecuted by multiple prosecutors from the National Security Division of the DOJ, and tried at the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia.
Federal Reserve Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz stated that this verdict sends a clear message to anyone attempting to mislead or obstruct federal investigations that they will face legal consequences.
Daniel Wierzbicki, head of the FBI Washington Field Office’s Counterintelligence and Cyber Division, also emphasized that the FBI and the Office of Inspector General of the Federal Reserve will continue to hold accountable anyone who transmits confidential information to hostile governments, endangering US national security.