As the 2016 presidential contest narrows further to just two candidates – Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and Donald Trump for the Republicans – one thing is becoming crystal clear for the former candidate: Her checkered, legally questionable past is catching up to her in a big way, and her chief rival is likely to begin using it against her, and soon.

As if campaigning under the cloud of an ongoing FBI investigation into whether she misused highly classified information and whether any of it was compromised on a personal email server she kept in her home – an unprecedented act for a serving secretary of state – the Washington Free Beacon reported in recent days that Clinton’s campaign actually made payments to a firm that specializes in destroying hard drives and their contents.

Why would an innocent person with nothing to hide do that?

As the WFB noted, her campaign made “multiple payments” that were recorded in February and March earlier this year to the Nevada-based American Document Destruction, Inc., a company that claims expertise in destroying hard drives or “anything that a hard drive can come from.”

“Our hard drive destruction procedures take place either at your site or at our secure facility in Sparks, NV,” the company’s web site notes. “This decision is yours to decide based on cost and convenience to you. In either situation, the hard drive will be destroyed by a shredding.

“We have a dedicated machine for hard drive destruction,” the website continues. “We will also record the serial numbers of all drives to be destroyed to be kept in our records. A copy of this log can be provided to you as well.”

“Our equipment is powerful. Whether you require ON SITE or OFF SITE service, performed at our Sparks facility, large volumes can be quickly destroyed regardless of staples, clips or fasteners,” the site says. “Office paper, folders, binders and computer media can be destroyed in just minutes. As a result, we pass the savings on to you! A new service we also offer is computer hard drive destruction, either ON-SITE or OFF-SITE.”

Indeed, it wasn’t as if the Clinton campaign paid a fortune for whatever it had destroyed; the first payment from the campaign to the destruction company came on Feb. 3 in the amount of $43, Federal Election Commission filings shows, the WFB reported.

Continuing, the WFB noted that “two additional payments of $43 and $58 were made on Feb. 21. A fourth payment of $43 was made on March 26, bringing the amount paid to the destruction company to $187.”

The web site contacted the company to inquire about rates and was told it gets $10 per hard drive and $5 per cubic foot of paper, meaning that Clinton’s camp potentially had 14 hard drives or about 38 cubic feet of paper destroyed.

On this heels of the WFB report came another bombshell that may also help explain why the FBI has been viewed as dragging its feet with the Clinton probe. Fox News reported exclusively May 4 that the Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” said in an interview that he not only hacked into Clinton’s personal server, but that it was “easy” to do and, more importantly, while he was inside, he saw electronic evidence that at least 10 other IP addresses had gained access, meaning the possibility that her server was hacked multiple times is real.

As an aside, and not surprisingly, a member of the dying Left-wing mainstream media – NBC News – had the Guciffer story as well for some weeks but sat on it. In their interview with Guccifer – AKA Marcel Lehel Lazar – scoffed at the claim by Clinton that her server was very secure.

Keep in mind, also, that previous reports have said that FBI investigators have found some 2,000 emails on Clinton’s server that were classified, and at least 22 that were deemed to contain “Top Secret” information. Keep in mind also that Clinton’s primary excuse – ‘they weren’t marked classified at the time I sent/received them’ – means nothing under U.S. statutes for handling such material. The onus is put on the sender/receiver that he/she should know what is and is not classified material, regardless of whether it is marked as such. Government officials, as The Daily Beast notes, have gone to prison for mishandling classified information.

More:

• Yes, America, Hillary Clinton is coming for your guns
• Is Obama letting Hillary Clinton wait out the clock on email scandal?