My guess is: They never seriously considered the possibility that they'd get caught. Nobody thought Trump was going to win, the Senate was expected to go blue,

My guess is: They never seriously considered the possibility that they'd get caught. Nobody thought Trump was going to win, the Senate was expected to go blue, and House Republican control notwithstanding, that probably drove a lot of their internal, err, can I call it optimism? And if everyone involved believed there was something there to find, it's easy to understand why they'd just keep pushing, figuring that once they found something concrete, the methods used to get there would get lost in the noise. I'm just speculating, but this may have played out rather differently had Trump had a two-digit lead for most of the run-up to the election. Anyway, if I'm right that they justified their actions because they were never expected to see daylight, that's particularly scary because it suggests that maybe this behavior is standard operating procedure. Invent fake dirt on your perp and hand it to the FISA court, use the FISA warrant to get the real dirt on your perp, do some parallel construction, and you're golden! They've got carte blanche, as long as (a) they get their guy or (b) their guy doesn't have any power to come back at them. Yuck. That sort of thing can be dangerous to a democracy.