Aaron Schock could not stop talking about the gold. He returned from a trip to Caracas in early 2025 telling a confidant that Venezuela's vice president had promised him a gold mine — an honest-to-godgold mine— if he could get U.S. sanctions lifted on the country.
No one around Schock could know whether the agreement was real. Like many things in Schock's life, it could have been a gilded mirage distracting from a more complicated truth. But for much of the year, those who interacted with him saw a man animated by the promise of gold, part of a supposedly eight-figure payday that Schock told business associate Benjamin Papermaster awaited him if he managed to keep Venezuela's relations with the United States from further souring. Schock grew seemingly transfixed with the arcane mechanics of turning a precious metal into wealth: finding a refinery, then a specialist who could extricate the crucial element from dilute ore.
"Gold guy is available in 5-10 minutes," Schock texted Papermaster one day last February, according to a message viewed by POLITICO.
The former Illinois Republican lawmaker had had a rough decadesince resigning from Congress in 2015amid an ethics investigation into alleged spending abuses. A decision to come out as gay in March of 2020 estranged him from family back in the Midwest. Since then, Schock had fled to Beverly Hills and reinvented himself as a hotel developer just as the hospitality industry struggled from the coronavirus pandemic. But you wouldn't have known that from the celebratory Instagram posts of ribbon cuttings in Los Angeles and New York City from the disgraced congressman who still cut the handsome figure of the boy next door.
Donald Trump's reelection in November 2024 was a godsend for Schock. A wealthy and powerful Trump donor was ready to pay him $100,000 to return to Washington's corridors at a moment when his earlier transgressions there might not any longer be legible as scandal. Schock was driven to develop a strategy that would keep Trump's relationship with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro intact so American oil business could resume operations undisturbed.
Schock traveled Venezuela, growing consumed with a future windfall embedded in a larger quest to rehab his reputation, according to a year's worth of Schock's personal calendar entries, private group chats and five months of bank transactions, alongside interviews with Schock's associates in the chats, including Papermaster, the top aide managing the project for him. Papermaster, who previously knew Schock socially but was unfamiliar with politics, ultimately turned on Schock due to what he described as a failure to uphold his end of the business relationship.
Schock did not respond to multiple text messages, emails, phone calls and a letter sent via certified mail to his Beverly Hills home. An intermediary, Republican operative Caroline Wren, said Schock told her that he would not "engage in a coordinated hit piece." Delcy Rodríguez, who was vice president of Venezuela at the time of Schock's visit to Caracas and now serves as president, declined to comment through a government spokesperson.
MAGA's cast of throwback characters has undercut the maxim that there are no second acts in American life. Schock's return to the political scene came freighted with international intrigue, a jet-setting influence broker directing a transatlantic operation to keep the United States out of war. The attempt to reinvent himself as a kind of global fixer after navigating years of federal prosecution led Schock into a cul de sac of MAGA influencers and oil interests looking to give shape to a president's fluid ideas about foreign policy.
"He's going to fight to the death to get this oil deal, this gold deal," said Papermaster, who served as an aide-de-camp during Schock's year-long quest to redefine Venezuela policy. "And he's gonna let everything else around him collapse."
Schock rose through politics with striking ease. He won election to his local school board at 19, four years later its president and then a seat in the state legislature while serving as a Peoria-based executive for a national real estate developer.
Source: Drudge Report
