• John Rogers, a former senior adviser in the Federal Reserve’s division of international finance, was sentenced to 38 months in prison on July 15 for making a false statement to the central bank’s internal watchdog.
  • U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich described a “pattern of sharing” sensitive information with contacts in China and said there was “overwhelming evidence” that Rogers shared restricted Fed information on multiple occasions.
  • A jury earlier this year acquitted Rogers of the more serious charge of conspiracy to commit economic espionage, rejecting prosecutors’ claims that he knowingly advanced Chinese interests.
  • Rogers testified he was “duped” by a Chinese handler he believed to be an academic, and said in court, “I am not and never was a spy for the Chinese.”

Jury acquits Rogers of economic espionage conspiracy

John Rogers, a former senior adviser in the Federal Reserve’s division of international finance, was sentenced Wednesday to 38 months in prison for lying to the central bank’s internal watchdog about sharing restricted information with contacts in China, according to court proceedings.

The sentence, handed down by U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, followed Rogers’s conviction earlier this year on a single count of making a false statement. A jury acquitted him of economic espionage conspiracy, rejecting federal prosecutors’ claims that he knowingly leveraged his access to internal Fed documents — including sensitive economic forecasts and briefing materials for rate-setters — and conveyed them to Chinese intelligence officers.

“This is far from the ordinary false-statement case,” Friedrich said during the sentencing, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The judge, a Trump appointee, said there was “overwhelming evidence” that Rogers shared sensitive Fed information on multiple occasions with individuals in China. She said Rogers took “calculated actions” — including the use of personal email and altering Fed materials to remove markings noting their sensitivity — that belied his defense narrative of being naive in his dealings with Chinese contacts.

The trial highlighted the federal government’s longstanding concerns about the Fed as a prime target for foreign intelligence services, with prosecutors describing Rogers’s alleged dealings as one battleground in what Beijing has termed a “financial war.”

Prosecutors alleged that Rogers dealt with a Chinese handler who, under the alias Hummin Lee, posed as an academic when he introduced himself at a conference in 2013. Four years later, Rogers met a woman online in China whom he later married, and Lee came to play an indispensable role in the lives of a couple separated by distance, language and a significant age gap, according to prosecutors.

At the end of 2018, Rogers spent a sabbatical in Shanghai and stepped up his meetings with Lee, who expressed interest in Fed information, prosecutors said. In messages, the two used coded language to refer to their meetings as “classes.”

The trial centered on whether Rogers was knowingly advancing China’s interests in sharing information or had been duped into helping spies he believed were academics.

Rogers’s defense lawyer described his client as “book smart” but a “sucker when it comes to a lot of other things.” Rogers testified in his own defense, saying he had come to understand Lee was a spy and felt he was “duped.” He conceded that he provided sensitive Fed information to an academic co-author at Fudan University in China, but his defense team argued that prosecutors had fallen short of proving he shared sensitive materials with his alleged co-conspirators in Chinese intelligence.

In court Wednesday, Rogers said, “I am not and never was a spy for the Chinese.” Detained since late January 2025, he described his time in jail as “extraordinarily difficult” and said, “I did not betray my country.”

Rogers’s undoing began with a blackmail scheme. In early 2020, online scammers threatened to release nude photographs he had taken and sent to people he believed were beautiful women — or to kidnap his then-18-month-old daughter — unless he sent them money. When he reported the extortion to the Fed, internal investigators shifted their focus to his travel and contacts in China.

When asked if nude photographs existed of him, Rogers answered no before saying he could not rule it out from a period a few years earlier when he was on dating apps, according to the court record. He responded “never” when asked if he ever shared restricted Fed information outside the central bank.

A search of his Fed-issued phone, personal iPad and email account revealed nude photos recently sent from his phone, along with messages exchanged with