A former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (FRB) was arrested on Friday for allegedly conspiring to steal trade secrets for communist China.
Federal prosecutors charged 63-year-old John Harold Rogers, a U.S. citizen with a Ph.D. in economics, with conspiracy to commit economic espionage and with making false statements.
Rogers worked in the Division of International Finance of the FRB from 2010 until 2021, “where he was entrusted with confidential FRB information,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. “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 PRC university, is economically valuable when secret.”
Prosecutors explained that the data Rogers allegedly shared with his co-conspirators could allow China to manipulate the U.S. market in a…
