For three years they used the FBI to threaten his family and jail his friends under an investigation into what we now know was a political campaign weapon falsified by the Clinton campaign. And the FBI knew that immediately as well. With Adam Schiff out there every day swearing that behind closed doors with the intelligence community he knew of big things that were going to come to light any day now.
But it worked. The political weapon did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Moreso than the right, it broke the left into the hyper-defensive ideological mess that it is right now. Fully embracing things that were mere crackpot ideas of their most wild-eyed constituents in the Obama years.
James Comey said a true thing - Hillary Clinton was under investigation for using a personally owned and possessed BES for official state department communications, which she destroyed when the FBI wanted to review its contents because what she was doing was illegal and a huge security problem. She was never charged.
And then the FBI went on to pretend well after they knew otherwise that the Clinton-fabricated Steele dossier might be legitimate.