Ex-Fed adviser gets 3 years in prison in China secrets case

WASHINGTON – A former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was sentenced to more than three years in prison for lying to federal investigators looking into whether he shared confidential data with Chinese intelligence operatives, the US Justice Department said.

John Harold Rogers, 64, was convicted at trial on Feb 3 of making false statements to investigators about sharing information on monetary policy, Washington US attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a statement on July 15 after the sentencing.

He was acquitted on a charge of conspiracy to commit economic espionage.

Prosecutors sought a sentence of five years. US District Judge Dabney Friederich imposed a term of 38 months.

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

Defence lawyers asked for no further jail time beyond the nearly 18 months he already served in custody. Prison officials will credit that time toward his sentence.

“While we certainly appreciate the care the judge took, we’re disappointed in the 38-month sentence,” attorney Jonathan Gitlen said in an interview. “It’s significantly higher than other defendants received in similar cases.”

Rogers has a PhD in economics and advised the Fed’s Division of International Finance from 2010 to 2021.

According to his indictment, Rogers in 2018 started responding to “information requests” from co-conspirators who posed as graduate students but actually worked with China’s intelligence and security apparatus.

In 2017, Rogers developed a clandestine relationship with a Chinese intelligence operative, prosecutors said. He later met her and associates in Chinese hotel rooms and passed Fed information that she asked him to collect, the US said.

Prosecutors said Rogers knew this operative was writing reports for the Chinese government using the information he provided.

Rogers “knew China could use advance knowledge of Federal Reserve interest rate decisions to generate enormous profits trading its roughly US$1.5 trillion (S$1.9 trillion) in US Treasury securities,” prosecutors said in the statement on July 15.

In return, Rogers got “substantial financial benefits” and help with professorships at Chinese universities.

At the time of the indictment, prosecutors said the conspiracy lasted from May 2013 until 2025.

In 2023, Rogers was paid about US$450,000 as a part-time professor at a Chinese university, prosecutors said. In August of that year, he tried to get emailed copies of two spreadsheets with proprietary information belonging to the Fed, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors said that when the Fed’s Office of Inspector General interviewed Rogers in February 2020 and asked him if he ever shared restricted information, he said: “Never.” BLOOMBERG