On Tuesday, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro launched a campaign for President Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison in the death of George Floyd. Shortly after, Elon Musk, who has been one of Trump’s closest advisors during his first six weeks in office, reshared the campaign on X (formerly Twitter) to his 219 million followers along with his own commentary: “Something to think about.” Shapiro posted a call for Chauvin’s pardon along with a petition for supporters to sign on the conservative media site he founded, The Daily Wire.“We write to urge you to immediately issue a pardon for Officer Derek Chauvin, who was unjustly convicted and is currently serving a 22-and-a-half-year sentence for the murder of George Floyd and associated federal charges,” Shapiro wrote in the online petition called Pardon Derek.  He continued, “As you know, this was the inciting event for the BLM riots that caused $2 billion in property damage in cities across the United States and set America’s race relations on their worst footing in recent memory. Yet, the evidence demonstrates that Derek Chauvin did not murder George Floyd.”Shapiro claims that immense “pressure” from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, rather than just the facts of the case, caused the jury to find the former officer guilty. He also says that Floyd was high on fentanyl and had a preexisting heart condition.  Though a flurry of false information about Floyd’s death has gone viral since Chavin’s conviction, the victim’s death was ruled a homicide. Expert witnesses concluded that Floyd did not die of an overdose due to drug use, but as a result of “cardiopulmonary arrest.” The jury took only 10 hours to deliberate on the matter and return to the courtroom with a guilty verdict.  Trump himself hasn’t publicly weighed in on a pardon for Chauvin, but it wouldn’t be the first time he pardoned a violent criminal since taking office. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants, including some who violently attacked police officers defending the Capitol. “It would be very, very cumbersome to go and look—you know how many people we’re talking about? 1,500 people,” Trump told Fox News while defending the pardons. “These people have served, horribly, a long time,” he said. In fact, an NPR report found that dozens of the pardoned January 6 defendants had prior convictions or pending charges for violent crimes ranging from domestic violence and sexual abuse of a minor to rape and manslaughter. Just days after Trump’s order, one of the pardoned rioters, Matthew Huttle, who prosecutors said had an “extensive criminal history” including abuse of his child, was shot and killed by police in an altercation during a traffic stop.

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