In 1974 Woods worked in Washington, D.C., where he served as a Senior Associate Special Counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry staff during the impeachment process against Richard Nixon. His job was to supervise the staff's constitutional and legal research. He led a team of staff lawyers (that included future First Lady Hillary Clinton) examining constitutional and legal questions related to impeachment and the definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors"one of the grounds stated in of the Constitution for impeachment of a federal official. Through their in-depth study of how the constitutional language about impeachment came to be adopted during the 1787 Constitutional Convention and of the long history of British impeachment cases, the staff produced a guide for the Judiciary Committee, a 64-page report, entitled "Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment," which asserted that not all crimes were impeachable offenses and that not all impeachable offenses were crimes, and that became a focal point of the Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry against President Nixon. Since 1974, it has been used as a guidebook during two House presidential impeachment inquiries: against Bill Clinton in 1998 and against Donald Trump in 2019.