President Trump has stepped up his attacks on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation in recent days, and his lawyer even suggested that the inquiry should be shut down. And just in case the direction in which this whole thing is headed wasn’t clear, Trump has now hired a lawyer who argues the president is being framed.

Trump’s legal team on Monday announced the hiring of Joseph E. diGenova, a former U.S. attorney who served as an independent counsel and a special counsel in the 1990s and was later hired by the New York Senate to investigate Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D). The hiring was first reported by the New York Times.

DiGenova clearly has experience, but what may make him most attractive to Trump is his thoughts on this particular case. He told Fox News Channel in January that the investigation is “a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime.”

“Make no mistake about it: A group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime,” diGenova said.

That interview was the most notable in a series of TV appearances that seem, in a way, to have been auditions for joining Trump’s legal team. We know that Trump seems to like hiring people who say things he likes on cable TV, and diGenova has supplied no shortage of that. Much of diGenova’s commentary has described a vast law-enforcement conspiracy to take down Trump.

Here’s a sampling:

Feb. 2: ’The largest law enforcement scandal in history’

“We are headed toward a very sad ending for the FBI and senior DOJ officials. … I believe that several high FBI officials will be charged criminally. And it is conceivable that some DOJ people will also be charged criminally. … I would consider this the largest law enforcement scandal in history for this reason. The activities of McCabe and others and Bruce Ohr and others were designed to subvert the Constitution and a national election, the most serious offense under our Constitution.” (“Hannity”)

March 15: Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe should be fired …

“He’s done a number of things worth punishment, including careening through obstruction of justice from the beginning of the Trump campaign, doing everything he could to exonerate Hillary Clinton in the email server case corruptly. … He should be fired. He should have been fired a long time ago. And if he loses some of his benefits, that’s good for the country. And it’s the least that can be done to him.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

… and the people involved should be arrested

“It means that the system of equal justice has been rent asunder by the conduct of James Comey, America’s best-known dirty cop, Andrew McCabe and others, including senior Obama administration Justice Department officials. This is a moment in history that has sullied the reputation of the FBI and the Department of Justice, and deservedly so. Every one of these people should be put in a wanted poster at a post office, even though they may never be arrested.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

Dec. 4: The raid at Paul Manafort’s home was a ‘disgusting display’

“Or show up at your house in the morning while you and your wife were in bed in order to frighten you like they did with Mr. Manafort. What a disgusting, awful display of raw political power. Not law enforcement power, political power.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

March 7: A federal grand jury should investigate the investigators

“This is why, Lou, the only way to get these answers, once the Nunes committee is done, is to have a federal grand jury force all of these State Department people, CIA, DNI people, FBI, DOJ senior people under oath in a grand jury. It’s the only way we’re ever going to get the full story. … This is the single most important scandal of the last 50 years because senior DOJ and FBI officials engaged in conduct that was designed to corrupt an American presidential election. It wasn’t the Russians who corrupted the presidential election; it was the American officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI.” (“Lou Dobbs Tonight”)

Jan. 20: Loretta E. Lynch and Sally Yates broke the law

“We’re going to discover that the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, her deputy Sally Yates, the head of the national security division, John Carlin, Bruce Ohr and other senior DOJ officials and, regrettably, line attorneys — people who were senior career civil servants — [allegedly] violated the law.” (Daily Caller)

Feb. 2: Attacks on FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein

“I have a lot of confidence in [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions ultimately doing the right thing. I have very little confidence in Rod Rosenstein, no confidence in Chris Wray.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

Jan. 23: Peter Strzok’s ‘secret society’ tweet was evidence of the plot against Trump

“It suggests, as we have said from the beginning, that there was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton, and if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime. Everything that we’ve seen from these texts and from all the facts developing shows that the FBI and senior DOJ officials conspired to violate the law and to deny Donald Trump his civil rights.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

Feb. 1: Wray planted stories about threatening to resign

“Chris Wray planted these stories himself. He is trying to show the employees of the FBI and the former agents that he is brave. He is stalwart. He is standing up for them. This is nonsensical. If he offers to resign, the president should accept his resignation. This type of behavior by an FBI director is childish. It’s immature.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

Aug. 4: Leakers are committing ‘regicide’

“They are encouraging these people to continue to leak and basically to commit regicide. I mean, they want to kill the president politically, and they’ll do it any way they can.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

Jan. 30: Rosenstein’s appointment of special counsel was illegal

“But Rod did something worse. He created a mandate for Mueller, which had no limitations of time, money, subject matter. He didn’t even name a crime that was being investigated, which was a violation of the Department of Justice regulations. I think when all was said and done, Rod Rosenstein’s memorandum and the appointment of a special counsel will go down in history as one of the worst decisions ever made by a Justice Department official.” (“Lou Dobbs Tonight”)

Dec. 1: Flynn’s transition actions didn’t break the law …

“All of Flynn’s conversations with the ambassador to Russia were perfectly legal during the transition period and even before. It’s not a crime to communicate with an ambassador of a foreign country about foreign policy when you are the foreign policy adviser to the incoming president. So, I don’t know why he lied. It’s inconceivable to me. If he had told the truth, there would be no crime.” (“Ingraham Angle”)

… and Jared Kushner may have done something wrong 10 to 15 years ago

“As far as Kushner goes, if there is anything with Kushner, it involves transactions involving real estate deals 10, 15 years ago.” (“Ingraham Angle”)

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook last week suspended the Trump campaign’s data consultant, Cambridge Analytica, for scraping the data of potentially millions of users without their consent. But thousands of other developers, including the makers of games such as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, as well as political consultants from President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, also siphoned huge amounts of data about users and their friends, developing deep understandings of people’s relationships and preferences.

Cambridge Analytica — unlike other firms that access Facebook’s user data — broke Facebook’s rules by obtaining the data under the pretense of academic use. But experts familiar with Facebook’s systems and policies say that the greater problem was that the rules for accessing the social network’s information trove were so loose in the first place.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in 2007 invited outside developers to build their businesses off Facebook’s data, giving them ready access to the friend lists, “likes” and affinities that connect millions of Facebook users. Practically any engineer who could persuade a Facebook user to download an app or to sign into a website using Facebook’s popular “log-in through Facebook” feature would have been able to access not only the profile, behavior and location of that Facebook user but also that of all the user’s Facebook friends, developers said.

[Cambridge Analytica CEO appears to talk about using bribes and sex workers to sway elections in video]

Such information can be extremely valuable to marketers and political campaigns for tailoring messages, ads and fundraising pitches. As long as the developers didn’t misrepresent themselves, Facebook allowed the data to be stored on developers’ databases in perpetuity.

Facebook changed its policy in 2015 after concerns about misuse of data by third parties and a shift in strategy tied to its relationships with developers.

The question of what Facebook permitted — and how everyday users understood those permissions — is under a new spotlight in the wake of the Cambridge revelations. In that case, the 270,000 people who downloaded an app authorized an academic working with Cambridge Analytica to collect their data. But Cambridge Analytica was able to vacuum up data from millions more people, analysts estimate, without their permission through the friends lists of the initial group.

On Monday, Facebook said it will audit Cambridge Analytica to determine whether the company had deleted the data it took inappropriately.

Cambridge Analytica did not respond to requests for comment Monday. Over the weekend, the firm said it “fully complies with Facebook’s terms of service.”

Congressional calls for Facebook officials to testify on Capitol Hill grew louder and more bipartisan Monday as lawmakers demanded that the tech giant explain how Cambridge Analytica obtained its data. The increasingly sharp and personal tenor of the requests, many of which sought an appearance by Zuckerberg, raised the odds of a fresh round of potentially contentious hearings — after Facebook defended itself in fall hearings about Russian ma­nipu­la­tion of its site connected to the 2016 election.

“While Facebook has pledged to enforce its policies to protect people’s information, questions remain as to whether those policies are sufficient and whether Congress should take action to protect people’s private information,” Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) wrote in a joint letter to Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A spokesman for Grassley said the senator had not decided whether to hold a hearing.

Facebook’s shares closed down 6.8 percent on Monday, at their lowest price in several weeks.

Cambridge Analytica obtained the data through a psychological testing app, called Thisis­yourdigitallife, that offered personality predictions and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” Facebook said 270,000 people downloaded the app. That allowed the collection of data on 50 million “friends,” the New York Times and the Observer of London have reported.

“Facebook made it easy for app developers to collect users’ friends’ data,” said Nick Soman, an entrepreneur who collected the locations of Facebook users’ friends to enhance his social app LikeBright, which no longer exists.

Facebook did not conduct an audit of Cambridge Analytica in 2015 when the violations were first discovered, according to Facebook. Instead, it asked Cambridge, the psychologists and an affiliate company to promise it would delete the ill-gotten information.

“The model was to build and grow and figure out monetization,” said Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager who oversaw developers’ privacy practices until 2012. “Protecting users did not fit into that.” Parakilas, as well as a contractor who worked on these issues at Facebook until 2016, said that Facebook did not conduct a single audit of developers during their tenures.

The Federal Trade Commission and European regulators had reviewed and were familiar with the company’s data policies at the time, Facebook said Monday. The company says that any user who downloaded an app or used the sign-on feature had to agree to a permissions screen that said, “This app will receive the following info: your public profile, friend list, birthday, groups, current city, photos, and personal description and your friends’s birthdays, photos, and likes.”

But two former FTC officials said that Facebook’s allowing the psychologist to take so much data about a person’s friends could constitute a violation of a 2011 consent decree with the agency.

Under that agreement, Facebook is required to notify and get explicit permissions from users before data about them is shared beyond the privacy settings that they have established. The fines for breaking the consent decree are $40,000 per violation, which could add up to billions of dollars if the estimated 50 million users whose data was taken by Cambridge were taken into account. The FTC declined to comment.

Facebook has denied violating the consent decree. “We reject any suggestion of violation of the consent decree,” Facebook said in a statement to The Washington Post late Saturday. “We respected the privacy settings that people had in place. Privacy and data protections are fundamental to every decision we make.”

David Vladeck, a former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said that because the practice of collecting friend data went well beyond Cambridge, “that in itself may be a serious problem, especially given the language of the consent decrees, which differentiates between users and others.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) urged the FTC on Monday to investigate Facebook. “FTC should immediately investigate and sanction apparent breach by Facebook of its 2011 agreement guaranteeing protection of consumer info — now a hollow promise,” Blumenthal wrote on Twitter.

Facebook once appeared to acknowledge that some data collection by developers ran counter to the expectations of Facebook users. In a 2014 news release announcing new restrictions to its developer policies, a Facebook executive wrote, “We’ve heard from people that they are often surprised when a friend shares their information with an app.” That admission may indicate that people had not been given adequate understanding of how their data and their friends’ data were used by third parties.

Facebook “goes into this endless hairsplitting that people should have known,” said Marc Rotenberg, president and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit advocacy group that has brought privacy cases before the FTC. “No one could have known that their friends were disclosing their personal data on their behalf. It’s entirely illogical, and it breaks the consent law.”

Facebook has the ability to ban, sue, warn or audit developers of apps who break their policies. The social network has occasionally cracked down: In 2014, Facebook blocked two advertising partners, HasOffers and Kontagent, for violating policies on retaining customer data and failing to notify partner companies about their data collection practices.

In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.

“We ingested the entire U.S. social graph,” Davidsen said in an interview. “We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.”

FarmVille’s developer, Zynga, and Tinder did not immediately respond to requests for comment.