That’s to stop the deniers that claim it was a warrant-less illegal tap. and make Hoover the target of the findings.
There was a legit reason. There’s a long list of CPUSA members and 2 KGB embeds in MLK’s group. That was reason enough. The FBI would have been derelict not to have been listening to King. And then just about 1 year later, King applies for a visa to travel to Russia and meet fellow ‘Russian-Baptists.’ Request Denied.
Again with the communists thing, plagiarism or not, I still don’t buy the idea that MLK is a communist especially not after he made that essay outright denouncing Communism as being an atheistic ideology that cannot be mixed with Christian principles. If he were truly a Communist plant, I’m pretty sure he’d be saying the exact same stuff promoting socialism even on paper that Vladimir Putin, Pope Francis, and Jim Jones did. Heck, he even made a similar speech denouncing Communism as inherently anti-Christian even earlier in 1953, as you can read in the following links:
https://christiancivics.org/blog/2018-4-10-on-mlks-can-a-christian-be-a-communist/
www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
Contrast that with, say, Jim Jones, who said, among other things, “If you’re born in this church, this socialist revolution, you’re not born in sin. If you’re born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you’re born with a big d***o in sin. But if you’re born in socialism, you’re not born in sin.” and “I brought you here to regroup, recoup, rehabilitate and gain strength, and militancy, and a proper education in Marxist-Leninism, which you had never picked up, even though I was avowedly, openly Marxist-Leninist and atheist, you have never picked it up, for the most part, in the United States, except for a handful.” Or how Vladimir Putin said that “[he] liked Communist and socialist ideas very much and [he] like[s] them still.” and especially in Valaam, “Communist ideology is very similar to Christianity, in fact: freedom, equality, brotherhood, justice — everything is laid out in the Holy Scripture, it’s all there. And the code of the builder of communism? This is sublimation, it’s just such a primitive excerpt from the Bible, nothing new was invented.” and also “Look, Lenin was put in a mausoleum. How is this different from the relics of saints for Orthodox Christians and just for Christians?” Or how about his claim that the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism had “wonderful ideas” comparable to the bible? And he’s the guy posing as a Christian in Russia. If anything, MLK even with his flaws is infinitely closer to a true Christian than Jones and Putin ever will be.