Representative Hal Rogers, Republican of Kentucky and Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Judiciary, Science, and Related Agencies, was seated on the left, with Representative John Carter, Republican of Texas, in attendance at a public hearing on Thursday, June 5, 2025, in Washington, DC.
Eric Lee | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A former senior adviser to the Federal Reserve has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for lying to federal investigators about sharing restricted central bank information with Chinese intelligence agents, the Justice Department said.
John Harold Rogers, 64, was convicted in February of denying sharing limited information about financial policy and making false statements to investigators, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a statement Wednesday. The same jury acquitted him of the more serious charge of conspiracy to commit economic espionage.
“John Rogers spent years secretly passing classified Federal Reserve information to spies in China, then lied to investigators in the eyes. And as if that wasn’t enough, he lied again under oath at trial,” Pirro said.
The latest ruling comes as the Trump administration intensifies its pursuit of allegations of economic espionage by the Chinese government.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich also ordered Rogers to serve an additional 12 months of supervised release. His defense team is asking for no additional prison term beyond the approximately 18 months he has already been in custody, with that time counted toward his sentence.
Mr. Rogers, a U.S. citizen with a doctorate in economics, served as a senior adviser in the Federal Reserve’s international finance division from 2010 to 2021, giving him access to non-public material on monetary policy and the deliberations of the Federal Open Market Committee.
Prosecutors argued that sharing advance information about the Fed’s interest rate decisions could have allowed the Chinese government to reap “significant profits” from trading in about $1.5 trillion in U.S. debt, according to the Justice Department.
In 2017, Rogers allegedly began a secret relationship with Fumin Li, a Chinese intelligence agent he met at a conference in China, and passed information on to the Fed during a meeting in a Chinese hotel room under the guise of teaching an academic class.
Before traveling to China, he printed a restricted document, removed the security markings, emailed it to a personal account, and forwarded the classified information to a professor at Fudan University, according to a Ministry of Justice release. In return, he received a university professorship and financial benefits, prosecutors said.
According to the Justice Department, during an interview with the inspector general in February 2020, Rogers was directly asked whether he had ever shared information about the Fed’s restrictions outside of the board, to which he replied, “Never.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
