Brilliant wrote: “I don’t know if it makes any sense. If he was a plant, then why would they need a warrant? And if he was a plant, then why would they accomplish anything by wiretapping him?”
They wiretapped him to ensure he was telling them the truth, ie, he wasn’t a double agent.
Here is a quote from Hugh Hewitt’s website. He received an email from an FBI agent who has knowledge about how these investigations work, and it illustrates my point:
“If Carter Page cooperated in 2013-14 in the investigation when Russian intelligence tried to recruit him, that means he had a “handler” in Counter-Intelligence — an agent who worked with him in 2013-14 because he cooperated and the Russians were prosecuted. The first thing that would have normally happen when Page turned up in the Trump dossier — when known to have previously been a cooperator– would have been to have his handler arrange to meet with him to talk. He’d cooperated before, and the first reaction to the new information would be that he would cooperate again. It would NOT have been to begin working up a FISA application on him. Page has denied that the FBI ever approached him in the summer of 2016.”
So my point is that if he was a cooperating party (i.e. a plant), they wouldn’t even need a FISA warrant. They would have just gotten his cooperation. The reason why they did not was that in truth, this was not a continuation of the earlier investigation. They were not conducting surveillance on Page. They were conducting surveillance on Trump. But it was difficult to get a warrant on Trump directly, so they used Page as a tool to get the warrant.
Of course, one could say that’s a waste of effort. They had a warrant on Page, but if Page wasn’t communicating with Trump’s campaign, then they have nothing. That probably occurred to them, but they were doing everything they could do and hoping for the best.