I’d never seen Stanley Woodward speak in person until this week and I can attest that he is the real deal. He genuinely and very passionately wants to get things done.
What struck me was his account of the deeper problem at DOJ. He wasn’t even talking about rogue figures such as Peter Strzok and Nikki Floris, who have caused so much damage. He was talking about the vast bureaucracy that has built up over the past century.
Even as one of DOJ’s most senior officials, Woodward said, it is nearly impossible to get anything done. There are another 110,000 people in the department, each with their own rules, policies, guidebooks, and turf to defend. When he tries to enforce the law or bring a case, he is met with a wall of supposed explanations for why this or that cannot be done. As he recounted through several anecdotes, in the end, he has to go and do it himself. But one man cannot defeat the deep state.
That is a much larger problem which has barely been addressed. Bureaucrats can cripple everything through deliberate obstruction or sheer institutional obtuseness. And they do. Also, a DOJ guidebook or handbook or whatever they call it is not law. It is all made up stuff, accumulated over the years, but it now carries more force than the law itself.