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...