The tweet below is less veiled.

Clarke is an outlier among members of law enforcement, but he’s certainly not the only example. Two dozen police officers in Texas were reprimanded after putting on Trump hats while meeting the candidate on the tarmac in San Antonio. The national Fraternal Order of Police gave Trump its endorsement, though it normally backs Republicans. Its letter of endorsement makes clear that Trump’s rhetoric about law enforcement — police get no respect, crime is rising, Black Lives Matter is to blame for police deaths, etc. -- has been effective.

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“Mr. Trump ... has seriously looked at the issues facing law enforcement today,” the letter reads. “He understands and supports our priorities and our members believe he will make America safe again.”

Police unions often play a role in elections. The FBI doesn’t.

Following FBI director James B. Comey’s letter to Congress last week in which he suggested that newly uncovered emails (found on the computer of Anthony Weiner) would reinvigorate the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, a number of other leaks ensued, to a number of different media outlets. Among the most substantial was a leak that the FBI had pressed for an investigation into the Clinton Foundation that didn’t come to fruition. The Wall Street Journal reported that the debate was symptomatic of a broader feud within the agency over the candidates for president.

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On Thursday, multiple outlets added more context, reporting that FBI agents sympathetic to Trump’s candidacy were perhaps intentionally hoping to guide the outcome of the race. ThinkProgress reported that the agency was looking into why a long-dormant agency account had suddenly started tweeting Trump-sympathetic details of past investigations. Bloomberg’s Eli Lake indicated that Comey’s political moves meant that "[t]hrough leaks and tweets, people in his bureau appear to be helping Donald Trump.” The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman spoke with a current agent who put it flatly: “The FBI is Trumpland.” Others disputed the extent to which pro-Trump sentiment existed in the Bureau, suggesting that frustration with Clinton was often matched by frustration with Trump.

What makes the moment unusual is that the agents are acting on their political beliefs.

“It certainly seems as though things are working a little bit differently this cycle than in previous cycles,” Heath Brown, assistant professor of public policy at John Jay College, told me when we spoke by phone last month. Brown has written about the transition of power between presidents.

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He noted that things like the FOP’s endorsement are typical, and usually about as far as law enforcement agencies will go, “knowing that they are going to have to work with whoever wins the ultimate election.”

“There’s this other dimension to it,” he added, “which is the difference between the political interests of law enforcement and the expectations of impartiality in their involvement in the enactment of the election. That’s always been the expectation and always been the practice of law enforcement — making sure that we have free and fair elections and upholding the law as it is written. I can’t think of an occurrence in the past where the impartiality in the conduct of the election was ever questioned.”

Brown and I were speaking about the conduct of the election itself, rather than any attempts to try to influence the outcome. He noted that the unusual nature of the 2016 election prompted a bit more unease.

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“I think it’s inevitable that when things are in flux, people don’t quite know how to behave,” he said. “I think that when institutions start to stumble and what we know as common practice — common rhetoric, common decency — is in flux, there’s all sorts of other things that change that we might not expect.” He noted the unusual nature of the presidential debates and the campaign broadly.

“What I think this cycle makes people worry about, myself included,” he continued, “is whether that institution — which is the clear acceptance of electoral outcomes, the very safe and peaceful transfer of power from an outgoing administration to an incoming administration — it feels as though that is much more in doubt this cycle. But that could be the feeling in the moment, the feeling of tension when things that we haven’t seen in the past happen that ultimately won’t dictate the outcome of the election, but might have other unrelated outcomes on the political culture.”

Put another way, we’re used to law enforcement playing a particular, often tangential role in politics both nationally and locally — a role that may seem, seen through the lens of an unusual political year, to have shifted. Part of that is the candidate who’s driving that change and receiving that support. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes put that concern on Twitter, “History shows there’s nothing dangerous about security forces and law enforcement falling in line behind authoritarian demagogues" -- obviously referring to the rhetoric of Donald Trump.