D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine added Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant in a consumer protection lawsuit against the company, one of the first to directly expose the social media giant’s CEO to potential financial and other penalties.

Racine tweeted Wednesday that after reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents produced in litigation and completing multiple depositions of former company employees and whistleblowers, his investigation revealed that Zuckerberg was “personally involved in decisions related to Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, and Facebook’s failure to protect user data.”

The lawsuit filed in 2018 alleges that Facebook misled consumers about how well-protected their data was, made it tough for users to control their privacy settings, and waited two years to disclose what happened with the data firm. Cambridge Analytica was hired by the Trump election campaign in March 2018 and gained detailed information of more than 80 million Facebook users, including more than half of the District’s residents, through a third-party personality survey, which was used to target voters.

Racine is seeking up to $5,000 for any of the District’s 300,000 residents who may have been affected by the data firm’s privacy violation.

“Under these circumstances, adding Mr. Zuckerberg to our lawsuit is unquestionably warranted, and should send a message that corporate leaders, including the C.E.O., will be held accountable for their actions,” Mr. Racine said in a statement to The New York Times.

But Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook, rejected the allegations, telling the Times that they are “meritless” and that “we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously and focus on the facts.”

The social media behemoth can file a motion to dismiss Racine’s motion to call Zuckerberg as a respondent, according to the Times. The company has been fighting complaints and antitrust lawsuits filed by the Federal Trade Commission in almost every state. In one such FTC lawsuit in 2019, the company succeeded in keeping Zuckerberg off a $5 billion settlement, one of the largest penalties ever assessed in the U.S. for any violation, according to the FTC.

That 2019 FTC settlement came after an initial settlement in 2012, in which the FTC said the company “flouted” the orders in multiple ways. The 2019 settlement came with new benchmarks for the company including implementing a stringent program to monitor third-party developers on the social media site, requiring the company to give clear notice of how it uses consumers’ information, and establishing an independent privacy committee.

Racine’s motion to make Zuckerberg a defendant comes after calls by federal lawmakers for tougher regulations on social media companies. Those calls were heightened earlier this month when a company whistleblower Frances Haugen testified to Congress about the harms of Facebook’s products including on teenagers’ mental-health, political debate, and victims of human trafficking.