A former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (FRB) has been sentenced for sharing sensitive economic information with Chinese spies.
Sixty-four-year-old John Harold Rogers of Vienna, Virginia, was sentenced to 38 months in federal prison and 12 months of supervised release for lying to government investigators about providing the information to those individuals, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia announced Wednesday.
Court papers said during his decades of service with the FRB, he had access to restricted information about monetary policy and was also entrusted with confidential information.
The press release continued:
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,” using the sessions to convey Federal Reserve information that Lee had specifically tasked him to collect.
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. 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.
In exchange, Rogers received help with his new wife, university professorships, and substantial financial benefits from Lee and Chinese universities. He told investigators he “owed everything” to Hummin Lee.
During an interview with investigators in early 2020, Rogers was asked if he had ever shared restricted information outside the board and he reportedly said, “Never.”
The case is a reminder of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and his reported connection and relationship with the female Chinese spy Christine Fang, who was also known as “Fang Fang,” according to Breitbart News.
In a video posted Wednesday, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said Rogers’ sentence was one of the longest ever handed down for providing false statements to federal investigators.
“He sold out his country and other members of the Federal Reserve Board, and he hid behind a lie,” she said:
Communist China has long targeted the United States and its citizens in numerous ways.
One example happened in 2025 when a U.S.-China dual citizen pleaded guilty to stealing missile tracking technology from a research and development firm in California, per Breitbart News.
The outlet reported in April that “A federal judge has revoked the naturalized American citizenship of a Chinese couple who initially arrived in the United States on H-1B visas after they were convicted of stealing medical trade secrets for China.”
