Ex-Fed Advisor John Rogers Sentenced to Over 3 Years for Lying About Sharing Secrets with China

According to CNBC, a former senior advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was sentenced to more than three years in prison for lying to federal investigators about sharing restricted central-bank information with Chinese intelligence operatives. John Harold Rogers, 64, was found guilty in February of making false statements to investigators when he denied sharing restricted information on monetary policy, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a statement. The same jury acquitted him of the more serious charge of conspiracy to commit economic espionage. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich also ordered Rogers to serve an additional 12 months of supervised release. Defense lawyers had asked for no additional jail time beyond the roughly 18 months he had already spent in custody, which will be credited toward his sentence. Rogers, a U.S. citizen with a Ph.D in economics, worked as a senior advisor for the Fed's division of international finance from 2010 to 2021, with access to nonpublic material on monetary policy and Federal Open Market Committee deliberations. Prosecutors argued that sharing advance knowledge of Fed interest-rate decisions could have allowed Beijing to generate enormous profits from trading its roughly $1.5 trillion in U.S. Treasurys. Rogers had allegedly begun a clandestine relationship in 2017 with a Chinese intelligence operative he met at a conference in China, and conveyed Fed information during meetings in Chinese hotel rooms held under the guise of teaching academic classes. He printed restricted documents before traveling to China, emailing materials to his personal account after stripping classification markings, and forwarded sensitive information to a professor at Fudan University, the Justice Department said. In exchange, he received university professorships and financial benefits, prosecutors said.