In both legal and practical terms it's important to distinguish between someone who is a surveillance target and someone whose conversations are recorded because they're talking with someone else who is the actual target.
True, it is an important distinction.
No, I don’t think he was an official target, at least not in any FISA request. Even if he was a target I don’t think they’d put it on paper. They were surveilling the Russian ambassador and thus, anyone who conversed with him.
This is where it gets fishy.
They targeted the Russian amb because the press implied, as I recall, that he was more than a typical ambassador - the implication was he was a station chief for all practical purposes. Snarky reporters played it as if he was recruiting. Of course that has to be taken with a grain of salt as the press is biased.
Yet the Kerry State Dept did arrange at least one of the events where Sessions had contact with the ambassador... and this fact was omitted by the leakers and reporters when the smearing of Sessions was hottest in early March 2017.
Then the Dems, who by this time were aware of “Amb Superspy”
had no problem hanging with him at the SOTU speech even though the press was reporting as suspicious anyone who so much as shook his hand... so long as they were not Democrats. Weird.
Question remains, was there really any particular reason to spy more closely than usual on a Russian diplomat? Was surveilling him was just a routine and nonpartisan national security matter that Trump associates just happened to get caught up in...or was the surveillance of the Russian amb unique or unusually intensive because he was a convenient excuse for surveilling or smearing Trump advisors and potential nominees?
Did the State Dept deliberately arrange the event that included the Ambassador and Sessions hoping to get something useful... or was that invitation just a routine courtesy for a candidate’s advisor? If it was just routine why not come out and say so rather than let someone be smeared over it?