McAuliffe personally lobbied Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, in a letter obtained by ABC News, and eventually obtained federal approval for Gulf Coast Funds Management – a firm headed by Tony Rodham, the brother of Hillary Clinton – to obtain visas for Chinese investors giving over $500,000 to the project.

So far, GreenTech has failed to live up to those job-creation promises, struggling to get off the ground. It employs “more than 80” workers at its manufacturing facility in Mississippi, GreenTech told ABC News.

The company was born out of a legal dispute, after two executives had a falling out with the owner/primary investor of Hybrid Kinetic Automotive Corp., the similar electric-car company they operated before GreenTech.

The story of this first venture, and of the dispute between McAuliffe’s eventual business partners and their former funder and associate, was complicated enough that a federal judge issuing an advisory opinion on their lawsuit expressed dismay at its “extraordinar[y]” complexity.