I believe the question (which I am not sure can be answered truthfully today) is “Were the wiretaps aimed at finding foreign links to domestic political campaigns?” In light of Obama’s foreign credit card financing of his presidential bit, which is illegal, and out in the open, this may seem naive. I guess there was a time when such things were not accepted as normal.
The Watergate operations were run without even a pretense of national security rationale.
That’s why they were operated by CREEP, Nixon’s re-election campaign, perhaps the best-named such organization ever.