Meet Ken Kies, the IRS's top lawyer. Per Reuters on Friday, he was "forced out after White House clash over tax audits" — specifically, forced from his role "after refusing White House demands to participate in tax audits." Hold on to that verb. Forced. * Now Al Jazeera's headline on the same man, the same day: "Top IRS lawyer to resign post amid disagreements with Trump administration." Resign. Amid disagreements. The way you'd describe someone stepping down from a golf club committee. * "Disagreements" is doing Olympic-level lifting there. The actual disagreement, per Reuters's three sources: administration officials wanted the IRS's top lawyer to take part in tax audits, and he told them that would violate the law banning the president and White House officials from ordering the IRS to "conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer." That's not a difference of opinion about the thermostat. That's a lawyer reading the statute out loud to his bosses. * And the statute isn't paperwork trivia — Reuters notes tax officials consider it "the primary safeguard against weaponization of the tax code." Losing your job days after citing it is the kind of detail a headline verb is supposed to carry. * Here's the best part: Al Jazeera's own article knows all this. A few paragraphs in, it dutifully reports that Reuters and The Wall Street Journal "described Kies as being 'forced out'" — quote marks and everything. So the body has the story, and the headline has plausible deniability. Most readers only ever meet the headline. * Grammar check, because this is what we do here: "to resign" hands the action to Kies. He does the leaving, all by himself. The White House — the party reportedly demanding things federal law forbids — vanishes from the verb entirely and survives only as scenery, somewhere out there "amid disagreements." * The twist that makes this one fun: Al Jazeera is usually the sharp one on US-government stories, and Reuters is famously the beige wire service that wouldn't call a fire hot without two sources. Today the beige guys wrote "forced out after refusing White House demands," and the sharp ones wrote a LinkedIn farewell post. Wrong day to swap costumes.