A former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was arrested Jan. 31 on charges that he conspired to steal Fed trade secrets to benefit the Chinese government.
John Harold Rogers, who worked as a senior adviser in the Fed board’s international finance division from 2010 until 2021, was charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage and with making false statements, according to an indictment from the Department of Justice.
In his role, Rogers was entrusted with confidential Fed information. But from at least 2018, Rogers allegedly solicited trade-secret information regarding proprietary economic datasets, deliberations about tariffs targeting China, briefing books for designated Fed governors, and sensitive information about Federal Open Market Committee deliberations and forthcoming announcements, according to the indictment.
Rogers allegedly passed that information electronically to his personal email account, in violation of Fed policy, or printed it prior to traveling to China, in preparation for meetings with his co-conspirators. Under the guise of teaching classes, Rogers met with his co-conspirators in hotel rooms in China where he conveyed sensitive, trade-secret information that belonged to the Fed board and the FOMC, the DOJ said in a news release.
The confidential information that Rogers allegedly shared with his Chinese co-conspirators, who worked for the intelligence and security apparatus of China and who posed as graduate students at a Chinese university, is economically valuable when secret, the DOJ said.
In the indictment, the DOJ noted that China holds about $816 billion in U.S. foreign debt as of October.
“Gaining advance knowledge of U.S. economic policy, including advance knowledge of changes to the federal funds rate, could provide China with an advantage when selling or buying U.S. bonds or securities,” the DOJ said in the indictment.
Also, in February 2020, Rogers lied about his actions and his associations with his co-conspirators in response to questioning by the Office of the Inspector General for the Federal Reserve Board, the indictment noted.
In 2023, Rogers was paid about $450,000 as a part-time professor at a Chinese university, according to the DOJ.
Rogers now faces the potential of a lengthy prison sentence and hefty fines.
A Fed board spokesperson declined to comment on Rogers' arrest.
