John Rogers, a former senior official at the Federal Reserve, was arrested in January 2025 outside his home in the Washington, D.C. suburbs while walking his dog, days before he was scheduled to travel to China with his wife, a Chinese national, and their 6-year-old daughter.
Investigators believed Rogers had passed information about the Federal Reserve to a man they identified as a Chinese government spy, who over more than a decade became involved in Rogers’ career, his finances and his marriage to a woman 24 years younger than him, according to a CNBC investigation into the case.
The relationship traced back to a 2013 conference held by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Shanghai, where Rogers was approached by the man U.S. authorities later identified as a Chinese intelligence operative. The two stayed in contact online, and when Rogers, then divorced, found a woman he was interested in on the dating site AsianDating.com, the man helped arrange a meeting between them.
Retired CIA officer Ralph Goff told CNBC that Chinese intelligence was likely aware of the introduction from the start. “If this woman wasn’t a plant by Chinese intelligence into that web dating site, then I’m sure that they had a meeting with her soon after that contact,” Goff said, adding that Chinese intelligence could have directed the woman, identified as Yu Yu, to pursue the relationship.
Prosecutors alleged Rogers accepted payments in exchange for sharing Fed information, a claim he denied. Agents who searched his home reported finding $55,000 in cash in his closet.
Rogers’ trial began in January. In February, a jury convicted him of making false statements to investigators but acquitted him of conspiracy to commit economic espionage. In July, he was sentenced to 38 months in federal prison.
The office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, which prosecuted the case, said in a statement: “John Rogers spent years secretly funneling sensitive Federal Reserve information to Chinese spies, then looked investigators in the eye and lied about it. And when that wasn’t enough, he lied again under oath at trial.”
