We can agree to disagree on Bragg's intent - I don't see any movement from either of us there. I cannot give reasonable doubt that Bragg had no personal and political ambitions to prosecute trump and create a sham trumping up of charges in order to claim fame for making Trump a felon. He had a long history of intent towards Trump leading up to and during his campaign for office.

> I don't see that as a real problem.

To clarify why the admission of arguments involving federal election laws are fatal for the case, I will defer to an anonymous 'Robert' on another forum I follow who said it very well (slightly edited fix some very minor grammatical issues):

All jurors had to agree that Trump acted to conceal another or third crime. They did not have to agree on what the third crime was. If one juror failed agree that a third crime was likely committed with intent, then the prosecution would have failed to show that the decision of the jury included all 12 jurors or in other words that the decision unanimous. They would all have to find all the elements of the crime they selected were proven by the prosecution beyond reasonable doubt. The problem is that by including a federal crime as one of the possible third crimes, the judge, without objection from the prosecution, included a crime which the prosecution had no power or authority to prove (as state prosecutors, they cannot prove a federal crime). If the jurors agreed on the elements of a crime for which there was no proof, or for which the prosecution lacked the authority to prove, by law it is not "proven". Since the judge did not require the jurors to state which third crime they had selected, it is not possible to conclude they did not pick as the third crime one which had not been proven by the prosecution, and thus it is not possible to state or conclude that the verdict was unanimous. The identity of the possible third crimes came very late in the case; it was not identified in the indictment. Had that been in the indictment, it would be clear that there was lacking an essential element for the case to proceed. That omission is not cured by postponing the identity until jury instructed.

So, there was clear error from the judge and prosecutor that led to error from the jury, meaning the judgement will absolutely get overturned. Given this and other potential issues in the case, there is a non-zero chance of reversible error being found, which would be a very serious matter.

The judge completely failed here, and had at least 3 possible options to deal with this issue:
1. Reject the case as presented in the indictment. Bragg could revise the case to only deal with elements that are within his authority.
2. Make arguments presented from Bragg regarding federal election law inadmissible, striking them from the record and/or instructing the jury to disregard all arguments involving federal election law for their deliberation. This option still isn't great given how late this would be in the case and could still get the judgement overturned on appeal, but would have at least shown the judge remotely cared about the glaring problem.
3. Instruct the jury to state which tertiary crime (unlawful behavior that leads to violation of NY election law) they believe Trump committed. If none of the jury listed federal election law as part of this, then there could be valid judgement. Again, not great and likely would get hammered on in appeal.

The fact that the judge did nothing to attempt to deal with glaring issue is pretty insane. It will be a pretty ugly stain on the judge's career once all of this is said and done.

> I don't see that as a real problem.

Again, we can agree to disagree on other elements involving the jury, including the jury instruction clarity and process.

> Regardless, this is just the law in NY, and in fact had they been given a copy of the instructions, that would have been grounds for an appeal

That is an incorrect, very narrow reading of a previous case judgement in NY. The case judgement said that written instructions are not mandated by law, and any errors related to the written instruction are not harmless. This means that any error identified within or involving dissemination of the written instructions to the jury would be grounds for overturning a conviction, which frankly is usually already covered by other laws and precedents around jury instructions. None of this actually prohibits a NY judge from giving written jury instructions, just that NY judge usually won't to prevent any possible unintentional error that will get the case overturned.

This NY-specific precedent is very controversial, and many other states routinely give written copies of instructions to juries so they can review it as they need.