Editorials of The Times

This is shaping up to be another red-letter week for Draining the Swamp.

On Monday, Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, splashed back into the news when members of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s team accused him in court papers of witness tampering. Swamp-watchers will recall that Manafort is facing a smorgasbord of charges related to tax, lobbying and money-laundering violations. Prosecutors now say he has been using his free time while awaiting trial to try to contact some former European business associates to coach them into lying about his work on behalf of pro-Russia political interests in Ukraine. Manafort’s secret lobbying scheme is alleged to have been impressively elaborate — as, also, efforts to cover it up. But the straightforward phrase that leaps out from this latest court filing comes from a witness telling the FBI that Manafort had tried to “suborn perjury.” Such an effort would qualify as a definite legal no-no.

Meanwhile, Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has once again burnished his reputation as the Trump administration’s biggest grifter. On Monday, Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., to subpoena the EPA for documents relating to Pruitt’s “multiple abuses of authority in using agency staff for his own personal purposes.”

Specifically, Democrats want to know more about Pruitt’s reportedly asking his agency scheduler, Millan Hupp, to handle various tasks for him, including finding him a new place to live last summer — a monthslong, labor-intensive process — and trying to help him buy a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

The mattress caper was, at least, more exotic than Pruitt’s usual shopping misadventures — the nearly $10,000 to decorate his office, the dozen customized fountain pens for $1,560, the $43,000 soundproof phone booth. It even could be seen as a positive sign that he has abandoned his spendthrift ways. No matter: By Tuesday, Pruitt’s furnishing needs became old news when it was revealed he had also asked an aide to help his wife, Marlyn, procure a Chick-fil-A franchise. Calls were arranged and the application process begun, but Marlyn Pruitt never did open a restaurant.

Now, as delicious as Chick-fil-A may be, using the agency’s staff to run one’s personal errands is, of course, a breach of ethics rules. Which may explain in part why, as The Washington Post reported, Pruitt took it upon himself to contact the CEO of Concordia, a nonprofit in New York, to scare up work for his wife. According to its chief executive, Matthew Swift, Marlyn Pruitt received a few thousand dollars to help organize Concordia’s annual conference last year.

And so Scott Pruitt continues to dazzle with his inventive capacity for misusing his position.

To be fair, the EPA chief is hardly the only official in Washington who’s been testing ethical boundaries. Just a few days before he announced last week that he would not seek re-election, Rep. Tom Garrett, R-Va., was publicly accused by former aides of turning his staff into “personal servants.”

Likewise, Manafort is not alone in playing fast and loose with lobbying rules. One of the more enlightening aspects of his indictment, in fact, was how it revealed the extent to which the K Street crowd dismisses as a joke the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires Americans lobbying on behalf of foreign entities to disclose who is paying them. Manafort’s experience prompted nervous chatter among his fellow lobbyists as to whether his high-profile case would bring greater scrutiny of, and a crackdown on, FARA abuses more broadly.

More often than not, however, such misbehavior stays in the shadows. Or, when it comes to light, it’s shrugged off as politics as usual. It takes something — or someone — pretty special to cut through the white noise of cynicism that surrounds Washington. Which is precisely what the Trump era is providing: a breathtaking, overly vivid circus of conflicts of interests, abuses of office, ethical lapses and breeches of democratic norms that has captured the public’s attention with its audacity.

Some of this stems from the Russia investigation. In examining how Trump’s inner circle operates, Mueller is uncovering all manner of questionable dealings — some of them illegal, others merely appalling.

That said, the Trump Effect extends beyond the Mueller inquiry and into the shameless, often hapless characters with whom this president surrounds himself. Let’s not forget, among others, Tom Price (private jets), John McEntee (financial crimes) or Rob Porter (spousal abuse) — and down, down the drain they go.

When candidate Trump vowed to drain the swamp, he most likely didn’t do so with the thought of targeting his own cadre of aides and advisers. But whatever his intentions, the Trump era is proving to be a master class in the many ways to abuse power — and the many ways to get busted for it.

When the government broke up the telephone system in 1984, the fact that AT&T could count most citizens as customers and that it was arguably the best-run telephone company in the world was not deemed compelling enough to preserve its monopoly power. The breakup would unleash a wave of competition and innovation that ultimately benefited consumers and the economy.

Facebook seems to be in a similar position today — only with far greater global reach than Ma Bell could have imagined. Facebook’s 2 billion monthly active users, and the way those accounts are linked and viewed by users and by third parties, have made it the most powerful communications and media company in the world, even if its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, insists his is a technology business.

And that power is being abused. As The New York Times reported Tuesday, Facebook shared data with at least four Chinese electronics firms, including one flagged by U.S. officials as a national security threat. We learned earlier this week, thanks to a New York Times investigation, that it allowed phone and other device-makers, including Amazon, Apple, Samsung and Microsoft, to see vast amounts of your personal information without your knowledge. That behavior appears to violate a consent order that Facebook agreed to with the Federal Trade Commission in 2011, after Facebook was found to have made repeated changes to its privacy settings that allowed the company to transfer user data without bothering to inform the users. And it follows the even darker revelation that Facebook allowed a trove of information, including users’ education levels, likes, locations, and religious and political affiliations, to be exploited by the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica to manipulate potential voters for its Republican Party clients.

Throughout its history, Facebook has adamantly argued that it treats our data, and who has access to it, as a sort of sacred trust, with Zuckerberg & Co. being the trustees. Yet at the same time, Facebook has continued to undermine privacy by making it cumbersome to opt out of sharing, trying to convince users that we actually do want to share all of our personal information (and some people actually do) and by leaving the door unlocked for its partners and clients to come in and help themselves. Those partners have included 60 device-makers that used application programming interfaces, also known as APIs, so Facebook could run on their gadgets.

In Facebook’s view those partners functioned as extensions of the Facebook app itself and offered similar privacy protections. And the company said most of this intrusive behavior happened a decade ago, when mobile apps barely existed and Facebook had to program its way onto those devices. “We controlled them tightly from the get-go,” said Facebook’s Ime Archibong, vice president for product partnerships, in a response to The Times’ article. Yet a Times reporter was able to retrieve information on 295,000 Facebook users using a 5-year-old BlackBerry.

A consortium of consumer and privacy organizations, including the Center for Digital Democracy, has already asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Facebook violated the consent order after the Cambridge Analytica disclosures. Facebook’s failure to protect users’ basic information from outdated devices is only more evidence that the company either can’t manage its data or can’t manage to care, despite Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony to the contrary. “I say this gently,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., to Zuckerberg during his testimony. “Your user agreement sucks.”

Zuckerberg told Kennedy that he should have “complete control” over his data. The senator is willing to turn that into law. He and his colleague Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., have proposed rules to codify the right of consumers to opt out and keep their information private while giving them more control over it. More important, the senators’ bill would require “plain language” so there’s no confusion — not a big request, since the insurance industry did so years ago without any apparent harm.

The European Union has passed such legislation, called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which forces companies such as Facebook to do a better job shielding individual data. Facebook says it is willing to extend the GDPR to anyone who asks for it. Though why should we have to ask for what ought to be ours to begin with?

Competition might change the game. That so many internet users are concerned about their privacy may serve as an invitation for another company to challenge Facebook. T-Mobile and its renegade chief executive, John Legere, proved that the wireless phone hegemony could be attacked by a smart rival that sells transparency along with cellphone service. Prices for phone service retreated; service improved. Everyone still makes money. Some company ought to do Facebook the same favor.

At some point a government agency might be willing to break away some of its components and chop it down to size. After all, it’s happened before.