Hunter Biden isn't any ordinary junior, livin' it up on the coattails of clouty old dad.

The former vice president's son racked up travel taxpayer-paid travel costs nearly five times as high as the next presidential kid traveling on the government dime. 

According to the Washington Free Beacon:

As Hunter Biden zipped across the globe for his business deals, taxpayers paid $193,696 for his Secret Service entourage, according to an official database that reports unclassified government expenditures. 

It's not just a high amount; it's high compared to other presidential children in their taxpayer-paid travels.  It's four times the taxpayer-paid travel costs of all the Trump kids combined.

In other words, Hunter, the ne'er-do-well junior who followed his father on his own business wherever he went, satchel out, scoring tremendous cash countries such as China and Ukriane, had quite a thing going.

The next highest big spender, according to this chart, is Malia Obama, who liked to travel around a lot with Secret Service in tow, too, and racked up a mere $42,000 in costs.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, whose Yuichiro Kakutani did the digging, it's not known why Biden needed to conduct so much travel on the taxpayer dime:

While his father Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden traveled with a Secret Service entourage to at least 10 different countries, including China, Qatar, and South Africa, according to a government expenditure database. He racked up 28 separate bills, all of which involved taxpayer payments to a "miscellaneous foreign contractor" or "miscellaneous foreign awardee." Many of the bills explicitly said that the money was used to pay for accommodations for the Secret Service, but others were scant on details.

With few details about Hunter Biden's travels publicly disclosed, the database is far from a complete account of his foreign activities. The limited disclosures do shed light on the taxpayer burden of Hunter Biden's lucrative global business career, which far eclipses the Secret Service costs for other presidential and vice-presidential family members disclosed in the database. 

So what on Earth was this guy — who refused to release his financial records to an Arkansas judge so as to determine child care payments in his baby-daddy case — really doing that he needed that much Secret Service protection?  As the taxpayers paying for this, it seems we have a right to know.  Seriously — what was Hunter Biden doing?

At a minimum, Democratic debate moderators ought to be answering this.  Better still, hearings should be held in Congress on accountability.

And given what he "earned" on those trips, maybe legislation ought to be passed to insist he pay the money back, or at least account for it.  He ought to be placed on a budget, with limits set by Congress, because it sure does look gamy.

Keep digging, Washington Free Beacon; this is a story we'd like to know about.

Image credit: Pixabay public domain.