This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Hillary Clinton’s youngest brother, Tony Rodham, died on Friday night, the former Democratic presidential candidate said on Twitter.

Rodham’s age was not immediately known but he was born in 1954, six years after Clinton, 71, and four years after the other Rodham sibling, Hugh, 69, in the Chicago suburbs.

“We lost my brother Tony last night,” Clinton wrote. “It’s hard to find words, my mind is flooded with memories of him today. When he walked into a room he’d light it up with laughter.”

Clinton described her brother as “kind, generous [and] a wonderful husband to Megan [and] father to Zach, Simon [and] Fiona”.

“We’ll miss him very much,” the former senator, secretary of state, first lady and presidential candidate said.

She did not say how her brother died.

Rodham attended but never graduated from Iowa Wesleyan College and the University of Arkansas. In adult life he was best known for his general consulting work but he was also a prison guard, a private investigator, a repo man, an investor and an insurance salesman.

His first marriage, to Nicole Boxer, daughter of former California senator Barbara Boxer, was held in the White House Rose Garden in 1994, while Bill Clinton was president and Rodham was working for the Democratic National Committee. The couple divorced in 2001 and Rodham remarried in 2005.

Rodham helped on his sister’s 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. He was not deeply involved with Clinton’s campaign for the White House in 2016, CNN reported, although he did stump with her at events in Pennsylvania.

According to a New York Times report in 2015, like his brother Hugh, Rodham sometimes drew scrutiny for allegedly “leveraging his ties” to his sister and her husband, Bill Clinton.

“It can go both ways,” Rodham said in 1999, of his relationship with his famous sister and her husband. “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.”

The same year, the White House publicly rebuked Tony and Hugh Rodham for a business venture in which they planned to export hazelnuts from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia with the help of Aslan Abashidze, the leading political rival of then Georgian president and Clinton ally Eduard Shevardnadze.

“If in fact this project is still going forward, we don’t approve and will continue to make clear to Georgian officials that this venture has no connection with or sanction from the US government,” White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said at the time.