get original element from ng-click

Question

You need $event.currentTarget instead of $event.target.

Not a direct answer to this question but rather to the "issue" of $event.currentTarget apparently be set to null.

This is due to the fact that console.log shows deep mutable objects at the last state of execution, not at the state when console.log was called.

You can check this for more information: Consecutive calls to console.log produce inconsistent results