
© Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesFormer Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, followed by her brother, Tony Rodham, stop at Casa Bella Italian Restaurant in Scranton, Pennsylvania on Friday evening April 22, 2016.
The former Democratic presidential candidate's brother, Tony Rodham, was previously married to ex-Sen. Barbara Boxer's daughter, Nicole Boxer.
Hillary Clinton announced on Twitter that her youngest brother passed away last night. She described him as "kind, generous and a wonderful husband and father", adding that they'll miss him very much.
The cause of his death has not been clarified yet.
Tony Rodham, who was born in 1954, worked as a businessman. He worked for the Democratic National Committee during the 1992 presidential election and entered consulting later in the 1990s.
Clinton's brother also faced several questions about his relationship to the White House and attempts to leverage his closeness to the president in his business projects and personal life.
Comment: Tony was one of the unsung members of the Clinton crime family. CNN
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Rodham did not appear to play a major public role in sister Hillary's 2016 run for the presidency but did campaign with her during some stops in Pennsylvania.
In 2000, while his brother-in-law was president, Rodham successfully lobbied Bill Clinton to pardon a couple convicted of bank fraud who paid Rodham $245,000 for consulting work, according to a House Government Reform Committee report at the time.
Most famously a consultant, Rodham previously worked as an insurance salesman, a prison guard and a private detective. In 1996, Rodham coordinated "constituency outreach" for the Democratic National Committee.
Rodham said in 1999 that he had both benefited and suffered from his sister and President Bill Clinton's rise to power.
"It can go both ways," Rodham said at the time. "There's some wonderful things that have happened to me because of my relationship with Hillary and Bill, and there's been some really terrible things that have happened to me."
USA Today summarizes Rodham's proclivity to trade on his sister's name:
In 2000, as the Clinton administration was coming to a close, Rodham successfully lobbied his brother-in-law, the president, to override the objections of the Justice Department and pardon a Tennessee couple convicted of bank fraud, according to The New York Times.
A congressional investigation later found that Edgar Allen Gregory, Jr. and his wife, Vonna Jo, who were in the carnival business, had paid him almost $250,000 as a "consultant" in their bid to get a pardon.
In 2010, former President Bill Clinton helped Rodham, then short of cash, get a job raising investments in GreenTech Automotive, an electric car company then owned by Terry McAuliffe, an old Clinton friend and later governor of Virginia, the Times reported in 2015.
"I was complaining to my brother-in-law I didn't have any money. And he asked McAuliffe to give me a job," Rodham said at a court proceedings involving unpaid legal bills to his lawyer in a child support case, the newspaper said.
He also drew scrutiny as co-chairman of Haiti's recovery commission, following the devastating 2010 earthquake, for allegedly seeking a multimillion dollar deal to rebuild homes in the ravaged country with funding from the Clinton Foundation.
In court proceedings in an unrelated lawsuit, Rodham explained how someone in Haiti had "donated" 10,000 acres of land to him. In court testimony, he said he had pressed Clinton for helping in breaking through red tape to get funding for the rebuilding project.
"I deal through the Clinton Foundation. That gets me in touch with the Haitian officials," Rodham said, according to a transcript of his testimony, the Times reported. "I hound my brother-in-law, because it's his fund that we're going to get our money from. And he can't do it until the Haitian government does it."
The Clinton Foundation said in a statement at the time that it was not aware of Rodham's Haiti project, which never materialized, and had no involvement in it, the newspaper says. Likewise, Clinton's office said at the time he had no involvement in the scheme.
In another venture, Rodham sought to export hazelnuts from the Republic of Georgia, where he was linked to a rival to then Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, a close Clinton ally. The incident prompted a National Security Council official to intervene to defuse a potential diplomatic embarrassment, according to The Washington Post.
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Comment: Tony was one of the unsung members of the Clinton crime family. CNN adds: USA Today summarizes Rodham's proclivity to trade on his sister's name: :