Driscoll, who has been well regarded by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, is a close associate of Vice President JD Vance.
Page A10From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 1 September 2026
Army Secretary resigns amid clash with Hegseth as federal judges report a surge in threats.
As it ran on the front
Here's what the euphemism does for you. 'Tensions with Hegseth' is the phrase doing the lifting in this one, standing in for whatever actually happened between a sitting Army Secretary and the man running the Pentagon, tidy enough that nobody has to say the word conflict, let alone the word purge. The Secretary submits a resignation. That's the whole verb. Submits. Like a form. Somebody in that building decided the paperwork was a cleaner exit than a fight, and paperwork doesn't leak the same way a shouting match does.
Same week, a different institution files its own quiet number: dozens of federal judges, describing an intensifying pattern of threats, in a report nobody had to write, because reports like this only get written when the thing being described has stopped being rare enough to shrug off. Judges don't file threat reports for atmosphere. They file them because somebody counted, and the count went up enough to put it on paper.…
…(cont) Put those two documents on the bar next to each other and the pattern isn't subtle: the people whose whole job is telling power no — a Secretary willing to clash with his boss, a bench meant to check the other two branches — are the ones showing up this month with resignations and threat logs. Nobody has to plan that for it to be the shape of the month. It's just where the pressure went, and it went there twice in the same news cycle, which is one more time than coincidence usually manages politely.
The stakes part isn't a metaphor. One of these institutions runs the actual chain of command for the actual military. The other one is supposed to be the last stop before power gets to do whatever it wants uncontested. When the guy who'd push back on one quits, and the people paid to push back on the other one report getting threatened for it, that's not two separate stories. That's the same story, filed under two different agencies, in the same week, and neither filing needed a motive attached to be worth reading twice.
“An Army Secretary who clashed with Hegseth is out, and the same week federal judges file their own report on threats piling up. Different branch, same pressure point: the people whose job is to say no are the ones quitting or getting threatened. That's not a coincidence you get to file separately.”
“There's no connection here — Secretaries resign for all kinds of reasons, this was a personal decision, well, the reporting does mention tension with Hegseth specifically, that's — that's just how transitions happen sometimes.”
The receipts
One jurist paid to construct a safe room after the floor plan of their home was posted on the internet.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.