Ron Johnson asks Secret Service to verify Hunter Biden's travel history after email bombshell

Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson on Tuesday asked the U.S. Secret Service to provide information about Hunter Biden's travel history following last week's apparent bombshell report regarding emails between Hunter and a Ukrainian national that suggested the former may have been selling political access to his father Joe Biden. 

That report, first published in the New York Post, cited emails obtained reportedly from one of Hunter Biden's personal laptops that had been left in a computer repair shop. Joe Biden has dismissed the controversy as a "smear campaign," though nobody in the Biden camp has yet denied the veracity of the messages. 

On Tuesday, in a letter to U.S. Secret Service Director James Murray, Johnson — the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — asked for several records pertaining to Hunter Biden's travel history with Secret Service details. 

In the letter — also signed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) — Johnson noted that several of the emails allegedly written by Hunter match up with records of travel history involving his Secret Service detail. One Apr. 13 email, for instance, makes reference to a trip to Houston. "Secret Service records show a travel entry for Mr. Biden from April 13, 2014 – April 14, 2014, to Houston, TX," Johnson noted in the letter. 

Noting that one of the emails references an apparent Secret Service detail a year after Hunter Biden ended that arrangement in 2014, Johnson asked the agency for any records indicating that Secret Service agents accompanied Hunter after July of that year, as well as records of communications between Hunter, some of his associates and Secret Service agents during Joe Biden's vice presidential tenure. 

"Please provide this information as soon as possible but no later than October 26, 2020," Johnson wrote in the letter.