Servis attorney argues facts were misrepresented in wiretap applications

An attorney for Jason Servis, the trainer who was indicted last year along with 26 other individuals connected to horse racing, argued in a court filing on Friday that government prosecutors are attempting to apply different rationales for the basis of their wiretaps of Servis than those presented to the judges who authorized the surveillance.

In the filing, Rita Glavin, the attorney for Servis, pushed back against the government’s justification for the wiretaps, and she urged the judge to throw out the evidence collected during the surveillance or grant Servis a pre-trial hearing that would consider the applications that made the wiretaps possible.

The substances at issue in the wiretaps are SGF-1000, a compounded substance sold through internet companies, and clenbuterol, the highly regulated bronchial dilator that can be used to build muscle mass when administered regularly to horses.

In both cases, Glavin and lawyers for other defendants in the trial have accused the government of misrepresenting the substances during the wiretap applications, and, specifically, failing to tell the judges that SGF-1000 had been tested prior to the wiretap applications and found to have vastly different ingredients and properties than represented in the applications.

Glavin and attorneys for 11 other defendants had earlier filed motions to suppress evidence collected through the wiretaps, which, in Servis’s case, were authorized on four separate occasions in 2019. The original indictment was unsealed in 2020.

:: Get Daily Racing Form Past Performances – the exclusive home of Beyer Speed Figures.

Prosecutors responded to the motion to suppress in early September, saying that the wiretaps were justified because investigators had probable cause to believe that the individuals were involved in criminal activity due to evidence collected on earlier wiretaps of other individuals who were indicted. Some of those individuals, including the trainer Jorge Navarro, have issued guilty pleas on charges of misbranding and adulteration of drugs.

But Glavin said in her filing that the prosecutors’ response to the motion to suppress contained “newly-crafted theories” that did not appear in the initial applications for wiretap authorizations. In addition, she said that the response failed to address the complaints in the initial motion to suppress she filed on behalf of Servis.

“The government’s opposition brief is nothing more than a strained effort to rewrite the wiretap applications with ‘after-the-fact’ rationales to save the wiretaps on Mr. Servis’s . . . phones [that] they rushed to secure as their first investigative steps and desperately wanted to maintain,” Glavin wrote.

The judge in the case, Mary Kay Vyskocil, has said that she intends to rule on the motions to suppress early in October. The responses to the motions are due by the end of September.

Prosecutors have said that they do not have evidence of any of Servis’ horses testing positive for any of the substances named in the indictment, so the evidence collected during the wiretaps is considered to be central to any prosecution.