Buried in New York Attorney General Letitia James's document-dump on former Gov. Andrew Cuomo's career-ending sex-abuse scandal are text messages from the Democrat's younger brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo. The younger Cuomo, it turns out, told top Andrew Cuomo enabler Melissa DeRosa that he got actor Alec Baldwin to help spin the story in Andrew's favor.

In March of this year, Chris Cuomo told DeRosa that his friend got Baldwin, currently in legal jeopardy for killing his cinematographer on set in October, to help spin the sexual harassment allegations against his brother as "cancel culture." In a rambling 14-minute rant, Baldwin had attributed outsize outrage among the public to the pandemic and demanded that "only" after James concluded her investigation into Cuomo could "we talk about people resigning."

According to the transcript released by James's office, Chris Cuomo told the New York Department of Justice that both he and his brother knew Baldwin but that, actually, he hadn't encouraged his diatribe in defense of the politician.

"I have a very good friend who is named here, who called me [and] said, 'Alec wants to talk about cancel culture or political correctness,'" claimed Cuomo. "I asked him not to. I said, 'Tell him to stay out of it. It's not necessary.' He said, 'Well, he's going to do it. And I think it's a good idea for him to do it. He wants to talk about these things.' Fine. I said, 'All right, well, that's my take on it.' And that's what it was. And when Melissa then told me that it had happened, I was not aware. But I did know its origin."

This revelation is hardly the most surprising or substantive of the treasure trove that's emerged from Albany over the past year, but it is a telling one. Even after Andrew Cuomo enacted a policy that killed upward of 10,000 seniors in nursing homes, lied about it, and brokered a $5 million book deal completed with taxpayer-funded labor — all while allegedly sexually abusing at least 11 women, including subordinates — he still had Hollywood A-listers willing to stick out their necks to defend him. And his brother, a primetime "journalist," enabled all of it.

It says a lot about the sinful and shameless nature of Hollywood — but perhaps even more about the degraded status of our humiliating boot-licking Fourth Estate.