Hillary’s brother back in the news

Hillary Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh, were often entertaining, sometimes alarming White House presences, but they had largely disappeared from public view as their brother-in-law left the White House and their older sister became U.S. senator and then secretary of State.

So I took note when I read Mark Leibovich’s admiring, even loving, profile of Bill Clinton’s best buddy, the irrepressible Terry McAuliffe. (The long profile of the former president’s fundraiser/rescuer extraordinaire appears in next Sunday’s New York Times magazine but is available online).

McAuliffe, Leibovich reports, now has a new business, Greentech, a manufacturer of the MyCar, a tiny, two-seater electric vehicle, and that’s where Hillary’s brother Tony Rodham comes in. It’s a throwaway line — “The board of its primary investment group is led by Hillary Clinton’s brother” — and Leibovich doesn’t say which brother is helping to raise money for the venture.

A bit of research finds that the brother is Anthony “Tony” Rodham, now president and CEO of Gulf Coast Funds Management. Once married — in the Rose Garden in 1994 — now divorced from Sen. Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) daughter Nicole, Tony came under fire for pushing for a presidential pardon in 2000 for carnival operators who had been convicted of bank fraud and to whom he had a financial tie.

Greentech currently has a plant in Horn Lake, Miss., where the cars’ parts will be made — Leibovich writes that McAuliffee “purchased a company from China and moved it back to the United States” — and will have a giant plant in China where the cars will be assembled. McAuiffe, who emerges as a hyper-optimistic and energetic in Leibovich’s words, is running for governor of Virginia in 2013.

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