“I hate to do this, but I would be remiss if I didn’t,” Zelin said. “Whether you are driving in a Ford or a Ferrari, if someone gives you bad directions, you’re going to end up lost. And those jury instructions were just a complete, just take the Constitution, throw it out a window, burn it, shoot it, and hang it.”

“I think that the jury instructions had a very key flaw here, which is the falsification of business records had to be in furtherance of some other crime and there wasn’t really great instructions on what that other crime was,” Parlatore said in response to a question about whether the jury instructions might lead to an appeals court overturning the verdict.

“Under New York state law, they’re not required to say which it is. But when they do, the judge has to instruct them on that specific crime. And the problem here is they don’t have to prove that they actually committed that other crime. They don’t have to prove that they actually had [Federal Election Commission] violations, but they have to show that what they intended to do was in fact a crime. And that I think is really the shortfall in the jury instructions is the lack of an explanation to this jury as to the federal election law.”