General Discussion

That much is obvious. The question is why was none of that of interest to Smith or Garland?

The answer to that is equally obvious. DoJ has always been a far right operations, willing to do anything (legal or otherwise) to support the authoritarians in our system. J Edgar set it up that way. We can cite a few DoJ people who depart from the J Edgar profile, but by and large, DoJ in general and the FBI in particular has always been, and continues to be, an operation that considered itself police, judge and jury and sometimes executioner because they and only they know what is best for the public.

Just this morning I listened to a podcast that retold the story of the 1971 break-in of FBI offices in Media, PA by the group the took the title Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Investigate_the_FBI

They successfully captured documents that showed the extra-legal means that the Hoover FBI was willing to go in order to intimidate citizens that saw the world differently from J Edgar, particularly with regard to the Vietnam war. There were hearings by the Church Committee and that resulted in some legislation to constrain Hoover. But that patronizing attitude within Justice is still strong today.

Burglary is a crime, of course. But what the FBI was doing was far worse than the crime of entering a building and taking documents that should have been in the public record already.

Just a side note, a crucial moment in that affair came when the Citizen's Commission had sent some of the documents to major newspapers. Hoover personally learned of that and had AG John Mitchell (could have been a twin of Merrick Garland) personally harassed and threatened the editors of WashPo to not publish the story. They had to think hard about that, but ultimately they went forward with the story on the front page.

THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN TODAY. And that is where we are and why we are where we are.