By David Matthews
New York Daily News
Elon Musk amplified controversial podcaster Ben Shapiro’s plea for President Donald Trump to pardon former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chavin for the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
Shapiro on Tuesday suggested that “if we are issuing pardons … there is one person that President Trump should pardon from federal charges forthwith.”
“The inciting event for the BLM riots that caused $2 billion in property damage in the United States and set America’s race relations on their worst footing in my lifetime was, in fact, the railroading of Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd,” Shapiro claimed.
https://t.co/ZQ9yABoWtM pic.twitter.com/4Wo1R3hamx
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 4, 2025
He added that Chauvin — who’s concurrently serving a federal sentence of 21 years and 22 1/2 years on state charges after pleading guilty to depriving Floyd of his civil rights and being convicted by a jury of murder and manslaughter in 2021 — is actually innocent.
“Make no mistake — the Derek Chauvin conviction represents the defining achievement of the Woke movement in American politics,” Shapiro said. “The country cannot turn the page on that dark, divisive and racist era without righting this terrible wrong.”
“Something to think about,” Musk said on X, while retweeting a clip from Shapiro’s show.
Something to think about https://t.co/KbZQEMpFXP
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 4, 2025
Floyd died on May 25, 2020 after Chauvin forced his knee into the man’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, all while Floyd was face down, begging for help and telling officers he couldn’t breathe. Chauvin’s actions were documented on video.
The three officers who acted alongside Chauvin — Tou Thao, J. Alexander Keung and Thomas Lane — were also handed concurrent sentences on state and federal charges. Lane was released in 2024 and Keung was released in January, while Thao remains at a facility in Kentucky, according to Bureau of Prisons records. He could be released this year, too.
But even if Trump were to pardon Chauvin, it would not affect his conviction on state charges, meaning the disgraced cop would remain behind bars despite having his federal record expunged.
In November 2023, Chauvin survived 22 stab wounds in an attack by another inmate at a federal prison in Arizona. The inmate allegedly told investigators at the time that chose the date of the attack — Black Friday — as a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement.
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