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RICHMOND — Republican state Senate candidate Bill Woolf, who is running in Virginia’s Nov. 7 election on his record as a former Fairfax County police detective and human-trafficking foe, would have been fired had he not resigned in 2017 during an ongoing internal affairs investigation into hours he reported being on duty while at another job, according to police records.
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Investigators concluded that Woolf, a 15-year veteran of the department, had repeatedly lied and disobeyed orders, and received police pay at least twice while moonlighting out of state.
Woolf admits to what he characterizes as one record-keeping error and one face-saving fib but denies any serious wrongdoing, claiming that he was subjected to the investigation because he’d “ruffled some feathers” in the department.
Records of the internal affairs findings were made public early this year as Woolf emerged as a star witness in a civil trial that made a sensational claim: that the county’s police chief, a captain and two other officers patronized and protected a local sex-trafficking ring.
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Woolf inserted himself into that suit on behalf of a Costa Rican woman who said she had been forced into prostitution in Northern Virginia. Once updated with Woolf’s allegations, the suit claimed that Woolf had been pressured by the chief and others to keep quiet about the alleged sex-for-protection scheme, forced to abandon anti-trafficking work and subjected to retaliatory disciplinary actions and investigations.
The chief and captain forcefully denied the claims against them, calling them “preposterous” fabrications put forth by a disgruntled Woolf. Yet the other two officers — one of them Woolf’s supervisor for a time — admitted they’d had sex with prostitutes but claimed the specific allegations in the suit were false or barred by the statute of limitations.
A federal jury in Alexandria rejected the suit’s allegations in January after defense lawyers for police spent days questioning Woolf’s credibility as much as the plaintiff’s.
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“Woolf’s conduct identified by this investigation demonstrates a substantial lack of integrity,” Fairfax Lt. Thea M. Pirnat wrote in a March 2018 review of the internal affairs probe concluded in October 2017 — a month after Woolf’s resignation. “If not for his voluntary resignation, the facts contained in this investigative report would have most certainly supported his involuntary separation from our agency.”
Woolf, a political newcomer vowing to bring greater resources to law enforcement if elected, denies any wrongdoing. He faces Del. Danica A. Roem (D-Prince William) in a race that could prove pivotal on Election Day, when all 40 seats in the Senate and all 100 in the House are on the ballot. Theirs is one of a handful of races that will determine whether Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) can usher in a conservative agenda that includes banning abortion after 15 weeks (with some exceptions) or Virginia remains a relatively liberal outlier among Southern states.
The outcome also will affect Youngkin’s prospects as a potential last-minute 2024 presidential candidate, a possibility that the governor and his team have repeatedly teased but say he won’t consider until after Nov. 7.
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Woolf is one of just 10 Republicans whom Youngkin endorsed ahead of June 20 primaries. The governor has continued stumping for Woolf and promoting him to national media, including in an August interview with the Wall Street Journal in which Youngkin took credit for personally vetting Woolf ahead of his endorsement.
Officials with Youngkin’s Spirit of Virginia PAC declined to comment when asked if the governor was aware that Woolf had been on the verge of being fired or was involved with the lawsuit. Woolf’s campaign announced Wednesday that Youngkin will headline an Oct. 6 fundraiser for him.
Woolf and Roem are competing in Senate District 30, a blue-leaning territory that covers Manassas and part of Prince William County. Youngkin lost the district by nearly 4 points in 2021, and it tipped even bluer in last year’s congressional midterms. But Republicans have touted the race as winnable because the seat is open.
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In a brief interview with The Washington Post on Sept. 19, Woolf said he left the department only because he had landed a new job doing anti-trafficking training for a private company for better pay and more regular hours — not because he was under investigation and at risk of being fired.
“The administrative inquiry never factored into my decision to leave the police department,” he said.
Elaborating in follow-up emails to The Post, Woolf repeated one claim made at trial: that he was targeted for investigation because he had defied orders to curtail his anti-trafficking work. But Woolf softened his allegations, saying that his superiors wanted him to drop anti-trafficking work because a federal grant for it was drying up — not because of a coverup.
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“As the federal grant funding … [began to run out] I was being pressed to shift my efforts toward combating other criminal activities,” he wrote. “Having seen too much of the horror and strife caused by human traffickers across Northern Virginia, I continued to press forward on tackling this issue and protecting the vulnerable women and children in our community. This ruffled some feathers, and ultimately, I believe, led to the inquiry.”
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Woolf did not answer directly when asked in subsequent emails if he stood by the claims he brought to the suit, including dramatic accounts of senior police officials threatening his career.
Investigators launched an internal affairs investigation into Woolf after he lied in March 2017 to officials at a sheriff’s office in Maine to back out of a speaking engagement there after discovering it conflicted with his vacation.
Investigators pressed ahead and eventually uncovered more serious matters.
Woolf collected his Fairfax police pay for April 19, 2017, even though he was in Omaha that day, delivering a paid speech at a conference. He put in for eight hours of overtime for June 12, 2017, and eight hours of regular time for the next day to cover his travel to and from Oklahoma, where he testified as an expert witness in a trial that had no connection to his work for the county.
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Woolf claimed to investigators and again to The Post that his supervisor had signed off on paying him for the Oklahoma trip — something the supervisor, Lt. Jane Burns, disputed to internal affairs investigators.
In all, Woolf was paid for 30 hours when he was not on the job over a three-month period (March to May 2017), internal affairs investigators concluded that October. Pirnat — the lieutenant who later reviewed those findings and delved deeper into attendance records — put the total for that period at more than 60 hours. Only the review, not the original investigation, stated that Woolf would have been fired.
Woolf left the department in September 2017. A little more than two years later, he had landed a Justice Department job as President Donald Trump’s special adviser for human trafficking, serving during Trump’s final year in office. He remained at Justice for the first three months of President Biden’s term as director of human trafficking programs, according to Woolf’s LinkedIn profile.
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In October 2021, Woolf read a news article about an alleged trafficking victim who claimed that two Fairfax County police officers shielded a prostitution ring from law enforcement in exchange for sex. The woman was identified by the pseudonym Jane Doe, and the two officers were not named in the suit.
Woolf got in touch with the woman’s lawyer, Victor M. Glasberg, and two months later, Glasberg updated the lawsuit to incorporate claims that police officials up to and including the chief had threatened Woolf’s career if he blew the whistle on the alleged extortion-and-protection scheme.
In a sworn statement filed as part of the case, Woolf said he had complained to the captain about a supervisor who took “unexplained and inordinate” interest in a prostitute they had been cultivating as a source. Woolf said he also told the captain that a trafficking victim claimed that Fairfax officers were demanding sex in exchange for protection. He claimed the captain told him to forget about it.
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In the statement, Woolf claimed that retaliation began in March or April 2016, when a lieutenant reprimanded him for defying an order against piloting his own aircraft while traveling on police business.
“After reprimanding me for having disobeyed a direct order, … [the lieutenant] turned off his recording device and said the following to me,” Woolf’s sworn statement says. “‘If you keep your mouth shut and don’t utter the words “human trafficking” again, all this will disappear. … You have six kids. You have to think about them.’”
The “threats brought me to tears for the first time in my professional life,” Woolf said in the statement. He claimed he reluctantly agreed to keep quiet about the alleged corruption and largely ceased working on human-trafficking cases.
Defense attorneys disputed at trial that police had curtailed any of the department’s anti-trafficking efforts during Woolf’s time there, presenting a string of emails from senior police officials congratulating Woolf and others on various human-trafficking arrests made well past Woolf’s claimed shutdown date.
Glasberg, the plaintiff’s lawyer, hailed Woolf ahead of the trial as a heroic whistleblower and said he still sees him that way.
“I have high regard for Bill Woolf’s integrity as a police officer, as a public servant,” he said.
Former Fairfax County police chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr. — who retired in February 2021 after more than three decades in the department, nearly a year before Doe named him in her updated lawsuit — declined to comment on Woolf’s Senate bid. But he shared his thoughts on the claims the former detective brought to the case.
“Frivolous,” Roessler said, adding a phrase his lawyer used at trial: “made out of whole cloth.”
Salvador Rizzo, Cate Brown and Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.
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