Jury rejected espionage charge but judge found calculated deceit

  • U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich cited “overwhelming evidence” of a “pattern of sharing” sensitive Fed information with China contacts in sentencing former Fed adviser John Rogers to 38 months in prison.
  • A jury acquitted Rogers of conspiracy to commit economic espionage but convicted him on a single false statement count for lying to the Fed’s inspector general in a 2020 interview.
  • Rogers’s case unraveled after he reported being blackmailed by scammers who threatened to release nude photos or kidnap his toddler daughter unless he paid them.
  • The judge described Rogers’s actions as “calculated,” noting he used personal email and altered documents to remove sensitivity markings that contradicted his claim of naivete.

Judge cited ‘pattern of sharing’ with China contacts

A federal judge in Washington sentenced a former senior Federal Reserve adviser to more than three years in prison Wednesday, finding that his conduct amounted to a sustained pattern of sharing sensitive information with contacts in China, even though a jury had rejected the government’s central allegation that he had conspired to commit economic espionage.

U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich handed down the 38-month sentence to John Rogers, a former senior adviser in the Fed’s division of international finance who was convicted of making a false statement to the central bank’s inspector general in a 2020 interview. In court, Friedrich said there was “overwhelming evidence” that Rogers shared sensitive Fed information on multiple occasions with individuals in China, describing a “pattern of sharing” that the judge said went well beyond an ordinary false statement case.

“This is far from the ordinary false-statement case,” Friedrich said.

Rogers’s path to conviction began in early 2020, when he reported to Fed security officials that he was being blackmailed. Online scammers, he said, 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 money. When Fed internal investigators began looking into the blackmail report, their focus shifted to Rogers’s travel and contacts in China.

During the subsequent investigation, Rogers was asked whether nude photographs existed of him. He answered no before saying he could not rule it out from a period when he was using dating apps, prosecutors said. When asked if he had ever shared restricted Fed information outside the central bank, he responded “never.”

A search of his Fed-issued phone, personal iPad, and email account later revealed nude photos recently sent from his phone, along with messages exchanged over the Chinese app WeChat with a contact who used the alias Hummin Lee, prosecutors said. The messages discussed assignments for Rogers to collect information and plans to meet in Shanghai hotel rooms, according to court proceedings.

According to evidence presented at trial, Rogers had begun meeting with Lee, who posed as an academic, at a conference in 2013. In 2017, Rogers met a woman online in China whom he later married. Prosecutors said Lee came to play an indispensable role in the lives of the couple, who were separated by distance, language, and a significant age gap. At the end of 2018, Rogers spent a sabbatical in Shanghai and increased his meetings with Lee, who expressed interest in Fed information. The two used coded language in their messages, referring to their meetings as “classes,” prosecutors alleged.

At trial, a jury acquitted Rogers of conspiracy to commit economic espionage, rejecting prosecutors’ claims that he had knowingly worked with Chinese intelligence officers. Rogers, who testified in his own defense, said he had come to understand Lee was a spy and felt he had been “duped.” He conceded that he provided sensitive Fed information to an academic co-author at Fudan University in China, but his defense team argued the government had failed to prove he shared sensitive materials with Chinese intelligence.

Rogers’s defense lawyer described his client as “book smart” but “a sucker when it comes to a lot of other things,” arguing the economist genuinely considered Lee a fellow academic and close friend.

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

Friedrich, a Trump appointee, rejected the portrait of Rogers as merely naive. She said he took “calculated actions,” including using personal email and altering Fed materials to remove markings noting their sensitivity, that contradicted his claim of being unsophisticated in his dealings with Chinese contacts.

Following his departure from the Fed, Rogers was hired as a professor at a Chinese university and received hundreds of thousands of dollars, prosecutors said.