One of the lessons of 2020 was this: When Donald Trump's lies start to unravel, don't pay attention to what his cronies say in the parking lot; pay attention to what they say in the courtroom.

This weekend, as a dispute erupted over the collapse of the criminal case against David Hearn for “vandalizing” the Reflecting Pool, that lesson came knocking.

Recall that on November 7, 2020, the same day the networks called the race for Joe Biden, Rudy Giuliani stood in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, making wild accusations of fraud in the Pennsylvania results.

He claimed that not a single mail-in ballot had been inspected as required by law and suggested that those ballots could have been filled out by "Democratic Party hacks" the night before.

He invoked Philadelphia's "documented history of voter fraud" to cast doubt on the ballot count, standing alongside a self-described eyewitness to fraud who reporters later discovered was a convicted sex offender.

Ten days later, however, while standing in a federal courtroom, Giuliani sang a different tune. He acknowledged to the judge that Trump's lawsuit "doesn't plead fraud," adding, "this is not a fraud case."

The fact that Trump has repeatedly lied about the Pennsylvania results ever since does not change the facts. He and the rest of the election deniers have never left the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot.

This same pattern is playing out right now in the case of David Hearn, a former Olympian who was accused and indicted in July for willfully destroying property at the Reflecting Pool.

On Friday, Trump's handpicked U.S. Attorney and former Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, filed to dismiss the indictment. In that motion, she was forced to concede that the pool's peeling was the result of improper installation, not vandalism.

True to form, Trump rejected his own Justice Department's retreat, posting that he disagreed "100%" with Pirro and still considered it "a pure case of VANDALISM."

Doug Burgum, Trump's Secretary of the Interior, whose agency reported the "crime," chimed in. "Vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool," he wrote, adding, "We won't back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments."

But it was Burgum's own department that blew up his story and the criminal case.

The government's sole witness on damages at the grand jury was a National Park Service official — an employee of Burgum's Interior Department — who testified that the pool was leaking more than one million gallons of water per week, its expansion joints were failing, and the liner contained a rip before Hearn ever showed up.

Put simply, the same agency that has insisted that Hearn was to blame had already told a grand jury, under oath, that the pool was falling apart on its own.

Burgum, like Giuliani before him, has been making his public case almost entirely in the parking lot of lies. For weeks, he told cable news he was "100% sure that vandals caused the damage," describing "multiple gashes" that added up to 350 feet of destruction. When confronted, he insisted, "It didn't peel off."

What likely ended this charade was the prospect of federal prosecutors having to turn over the evidence of what really happened. The evidence in their own files showed that they were prosecuting an innocent man. A federal judge was not going to let this slide.

In that sense, Pirro's office learned what federal courts have repeatedly taught prosecutors who abuse the criminal process to target people who are not guilty of a crime.

This isn't an isolated embarrassment. According to tracking by the Just Security project, judges have dismissed, or prosecutors have withdrawn, thousands of charges against migrants for lack of evidence of criminal intent, and nearly half of all cases nationwide brought against protesters and immigrants for assaulting a law enforcement officer have been dismissed, withdrawn, or ended in acquittals.

Case after case, the story is the same. Bold public statements fall apart when placed under the scrutiny of a judge.

Giuliani and Burgum were both successful men who sacrificed their reputations to serve Donald Trump. They fell into the same trap as so many others in his orbit — when the cameras are rolling in a parking lot or a cable news set, they must keep false conspiracies alive.

Eventually, when faced with a judge, the truth slips out. But by then, much of the damage is already done.

Giuliani's lies damaged our democracy well beyond 2020. No amount of vindication will fully compensate David Hearn for what he has been through.

This has to end — and the bright lights of the courtroom shouldn’t be the only remedy for correcting Republican lies. Too often, the legacy media proceeds with both-sides coverage: "Trump says X, but critics dispute it." The Trump administration has long forfeited its right to be believed or to be presumed to be acting in good faith.

So, the next time a cabinet secretary says he's "100% sure," the media should insist he say it under oath. Otherwise, it should be treated as just another lie in a parking lot.