Sometimes silence is louder than a lie.
In 2018, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Surovics issued a letter that should have changed everything. In it, he acknowledged that Fred Olivares — who had quietly become part of my defense team — once sat shoulder-to-shoulder with the original FBI case agent in the very office investigating me. Erin Isley, the case agent, was under Olivares’s supervision. He was her mentor.
That’s not a gray area. That’s a flashing red conflict of interest.
But instead of bringing it to the court’s attention, instead of disclosing the conflict to the defense or moving to protect the integrity of the case, Gregory Surovics did nothing.
Worse, he allowed Olivares to stay embedded in my defense team — the same Olivares who had access to the government’s internal knowledge and likely had firsthand input on the very case strategies now being used against me.
And the DOJ has the audacity to pretend that no harm occurred.
The letter alone should have resulted in immediate court review. Instead, it was buried. Quietly sent to my former attorney, not filed in court, not disclosed to me, and not acted on in any meaningful way.
That is the very definition of concealment.
It wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t an oversight. It was a deliberate choice to stay silent about something that strikes at the heart of justice. And it came from the prosecutor himself.
AUSA Gregory Surovics didn’t just fail to act. He enabled the conflict. He allowed Olivares to operate in dual roles, undermining the fairness of the process and the legitimacy of my defense.
I sat through trial. I was convicted. And I never once knew that my own investigator had sat at the right hand of the agent who helped build the case against me.
This isn’t a technicality. It’s prosecutorial misconduct by omission.
And Gregory Surovics owns every inch of it.
Gregory Surovics let the conflict unfold. But Thomas McHugh watched it happen from the defense table and let it ride. He never filed a motion to dismiss, never objected to the false wire fraud theory, and never disclosed Olivares’ history. That wasn’t just negligence — it was silence by design. Here’s what McHugh knew — and what he let happen.