Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaidó

Foley & Larder has backed away from representing a top Venezuelan official just a week after registering as a foreign agent to handle the work.

Venezuelan Inspector General Reinaldo Munoz, the top attorney in President Nicolas Maduro's government, hired the firm to help repair bilateral relations with the Trump administration, according to a Jan. 24 disclosure. But that arrangement is now dead in the water, according to The Associated Press.

Citing unnamed sources, the AP reported Thursday that the Milwaukee-based firm, which has its second-largest office in Washington, D.C., will be withdrawing from the representation.

Jill Chanen, a firm spokesperson, said Friday that Foley & Larder does "not comment on client matters."

Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott decried the representation after it was reported last week, saying in a letter to the firm that he and other senators would boycott the firm because they believed it was representing a "dangerous dictator."

According to its Foreign Agents Registration Act filing, Foley & Lardner agreed to represent Munoz, and by proxy Maduro, in an arrangement that was to pay the firm a fee of $12.5 million. The firm said in the filing that it had received $3 million so far from Munoz. The payments came from two companies incorporated in Hong Kong: Fang Ming Ltd. and Chengfa Trade Co.

The disclosure said Foley's work would include "developing a strategy to approach the U.S. government in support of delisting the Foreign Principal or other parties subject to U.S. economic sanctions due to their connections to the Republic."

As part of that strategy, Foley paid $2 million to D.C. lobbying firm Sonoran Policy Group and its founder Robert Stryk.

Stryk, a winemaker and failed mayoral candidate in Yountville, California, was an unpaid campaign adviser on the West Coast for President Donald Trump. His firm reported no lobbying income between 2013 and 2016, but collected over $10 million in fees since the start of 2017, according to The New York Times.

Stryk's firm has recently represented several governments that have fallen out of favor in Washington, including Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Saudi Arabia.

Stryk's name also came up during Trump's impeachment inquiry, where it was disclosed that Rudy Guiliani associate Lev Parnas wrote a note to himself to "hire Robert Stryk lobbiest" [sic].

The U.S. has labeled Maduro a dictator, and has made multiple overtures to oust the socialist from power. The Venezuelan president has overcome a coup attempt, runaway inflation and food shortages, several massive protests, and U.S. sanctions that have cut the country off from Western banks over the past year.

Foley & Lardner is hardly the first U.S. law firm to get involved in the tug of war between Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaido, whom the U.S. and 60 other countries have recognized as the country's rightful leader.

D.C.-based Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer was representing Maduro until March of 2019, when the firm switched over to Guaido after the U.S. officially recognized him as Venezuela's "rightful leader".

Another D.C. giant, Venable, then stepped in to represent Maduro, and the two firms were jostling in a corporate expropriation case over which man was in charge.

Stryk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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