ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS:

I set to work on my new project at the Hudson Institute doing open-source research on corruption. But what had long been my fringe interest on the nexus of money laundering through luxury real estate, shell companies, and Russian oligarchs no longer felt so eccentric as Paul Manafort was arrested and Robert Mueller started digging into Ukrainian money trails.

Something strange was happening. Offline, living in a Whole Foods-eating, Netflix-watching bubble off Dupont Circle, Washington felt like one of the softest places in the world. Moscow, goodbye. But online, and on TV, it was quite another matter.

I had to pinch myself watching Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on Fox News. These men, railing furiously against plots and traitors, were eerily reminiscent of the propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov on Channel One Russia.

But that was not all. The mounting hysteria about foreign influence. The professional trolls and Twitter accounts laying blame on MI6. I felt like I had seen it all before. But nothing more so than the fact that smart people kept telling me power was measured here by proximity to the president, not by the office you held.

So I wasn't surprised when my computer was hacked in a custom-made attack launched from a Russian-speaking country. Nor was I shocked when Microsoft revealed that, once I had finished my research into how kleptocrats move around their money, my project had been targeted by hackers run by Russian intelligence who cloned a website in order to phish the accounts of anyone interested in our work.

But this time I didn't stop to think Why me? It was now perfectly clear. What upsets the current regime in Moscow is not what used to infuriate the old Soviet authorities--research into its military strength--but anything exploring its illicit finances. Something similar might now be said of the current White House.

Looking back on it, I realize that every story I ever filed from Russia was not just a politics story, or a crime story, or a spy story--but almost always, on some level, also a corruption story.

That's one final, spooky way that Washington now feels just like Moscow.

A bill that would have significantly bolstered the nation's defenses against electoral interference has been held up in the Senate at the behest of the White House, which opposed the proposed legislation, according to congressional sources.

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