Jeffrey Toobin’s apology this week for covering the Hillary Clinton email scandal is the perfect marriage of high self-regard and subservience to a political party.

I did not think it was possible to combine the two so flawlessly, but that just shows what I know.

The New Yorker staffer and CNN legal analyst expressed remorse Monday for commenting in 2016 on Clinton’s private homebrew email server, going so far as to say that the press's coverage of the FBI’s investigation of the former secretary of state’s mishandling of classified intelligence "very likely lost” her the presidential election.

The Clinton email scandal "is also a story about the news media, about how much time we spent on that, and that's something that I have felt a great deal of personal responsibility for,” Toobin said Monday on CNN. "Because I talked about the emails here at CNN, I wrote about it in the New Yorker, and I think I paid too much attention to them, and I regret that."

He added, "I hope a lesson is learned. I mean, this story turns out to be … a big nothing, and we spent months on it. Hillary Clinton very likely lost the election because of it, and I think I should have been talking about other issues, not about the emails."

It seems like a contradiction to bend one’s knee to a failed presidential candidate while also claiming to possess personally the sort of influence necessary to thwart said presidential candidate’s White House ambitions. Yet here is Toobin doing exactly that, because he is as tone-deaf as he is conceited:

Just so we are all on the same page: Toobin is apologizing for following a major news story because he believes it adversely affected a Democratic candidate.

His remarks Monday come not long after the State Department released the results of a three-year-long investigation that found Clinton’s aides and staffers did not engage in the “systemic” mishandling of classified information. But the inquiry also found that 38 State Department employees committed 91 “security violations involving emails sent to or from Clinton’s private server," Politico reported. In all, the State Department investigation found an estimated 600 security violations that occurred during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

For Toobin, however, the big takeaway from the report is that he failed. He failed profession, he failed Clinton, and he failed his apparently massive audience by spending too much time talking about a former secretary of state skirting Freedom of Information Act laws by running work emails through a private server installed in her home bathroom.

“I think I got into the trap of false equivalence during the 2016 campaign,” he told Politico. “Comparing Donald Trump’s record of ethical problems with Hillary’s emails lent a misleading impression. and I have to say, I am determined not to do that again to the extent that I can. I am going to try to look at corruption and ethics issues each on their own rather than trying to create some sort of equivalence that isn’t there.”

He also said in a tweet Monday, “As a journalist, I regret my role in blowing this story out of proportion.”

Note the mostly buried news that State Dept closed @HillaryClinton email probe with this verdict: no big deal. As a journalist, I regret my role in blowing this story out of proportion.https://t.co/Ls7zto7uDJ — Jeffrey Toobin (@JeffreyToobin) October 21, 2019

His invoking of the word "journalist" is a bit rich. A real journalist would not apologize for covering a legitimate news story, including one that involves an FBI investigation and a secretary of state-turned-presidential candidate who had been “extremely careless” with classified intelligence.