Like a Times Square hustler with three walnut shells and a pea, Hillary Clinton has been playing a game of misdirection with her email server.  No, it wasn’t in Chappaqua; it was in New Jersey, although not dumped in a Meadowlands bog or buried under the goalposts of MetLife Stadium, as Jimmy Hoffa was sometimes reckoned to have been.

Actually, it was in the hands of a company, Platte River Networks, that has been sued for “illegally accessing” a master database of phone numbers and “stealing White House military advisers’ phone numbers.”  And these dodgy tech wizards are said to have turned over to the FBI a server that now is “blank.”  Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller writes:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s mysterious email server has been in a private data center in New Jersey since 2013, that is, until the IT company the former secretary of state hired to maintain the hardware handed the “blank” device over to the FBI Wednesday.

Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, informed the Department of State in a letter Wednesday that the company hired to manage and maintain the server, Denver-based Platte River Networks, was turning it over to the Department of Justice. Kendall also told State he handed over three thumb drives that contained Clinton’s emails. (snip)

Barbara Wells, an attorney for the company, told The Post agents picked the server up at around 4 p.m. Wednesday. But she said the hardware is “now blank” and no longer contains any useful information.

“The information had been migrated over to a different server for purposes of transition,” said Wells. The transfer was carried out in June 2013, she told The Post.

“To my knowledge the data on the old server is not available now on any servers or devices in Platte River Network’s control.”

So where is the pea (the email records)?  It’s not under the shell handed over to the FBI.  It’s not under the shell in the hands of the New Jersey IT company (or so they claim).  And Hillary, Cheryl Mills, and Huma Abedin all have sworn under penalty of perjury that they don’t have it.  And the second server? Sin ce Hillary pre-empted a subpoena, nobody seeems very interested in pursuing it.  For now.

Probably it sleeps with the cyberspace equivalent of the fishes.  Hillary has been boning up for quite a while on how to make emails disappear.  As Jonathan Karl of ABC News reports:

The last batch of Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department included one from Clinton asking to borrow a book called “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe.

Clinton has not said why she requested the book, but it includes some advice that is particularly interesting in light of the controversy over her unconventional email arrangement at the State Department and her decision to delete tens of thousands of emails she deemed to be purely personal.

The copy that ABC downloaded for $9.99 had some interesting revelations.

Take, for example, Chapter Six: “The Email That Can Land You In Jail.” The chapter includes a section entitled “How to Delete Something So It Stays Deleted.”

“Some people are hoarders, some are checkers,” the authors write. “The main thing to consider is that once you do decide to delete, it’s like taking the garbage from your kitchen and putting it in your hallway. It’s still there.”

The chapter advised that to truly delete emails may require a special rewriting program “to make sure that it’s not just elsewhere on the drive but has in fact been written over sixteen or twenty times and rendered undefinable.”

But Shipley and Schwalbe warn that deleting emails could lead to future legal troubles.

Hillary’s and Bill’s pattern, going back to her Arkansas days, has been to obliterate evidence to the extent that a conviction is not possible.  No matter how much smoke there is, proving that a fire broke out is just too difficult.  Like trying to pick out the walnut shell with the pea under it.

However, the appearances are just terrible.  Terrible enough that even Al Gore is rumored to be entering the race.  Like vultures circling a dying man in the desert, Hillary is attracting what’s left of the faintly plausible alternatives to her at the top of the Democrats’ ticket (while Elizabeth Warren crouches in the tall grass).

Needless to say, the Chinese, the Russians, and probably at least a dozen other foreign intelligence services have the evidence that the FBI lacks and look forward to blackmailing a President Rodham-Clinton.  Which is reason enough to reject the idea of electing her.