Stormy Daniels lawyer thought Michael Cohen ‘was going to kill himself’ when Trump didn’t give him role in White House

The attorney who negotiated Stormy Daniels’ $130,000 payment from Michael Cohen thought Donald Trump’s then-attorney was going to “kill himself” when he learned he was left out of a job in Washington DC after the 2016 election.

In his second day of testimony in the former president’s hush money trial in Manhattan on Thursday, Keith Davidson said Cohen was distraught by mid-December 2016.

“I thought he was going to kill himself,” Mr Davidson said.

Earlier, he recalled Cohen telling him: “Jesus Christ, can you believe I’m not going to Washington?”

“I’ve saved that guy’s ass so many times you don’t even know,” Mr Davidson recalled Cohen saying during his testimony. “That guy’s not even paying the $130,000 back.”

Mr Davidson claimed that Cohen often thought he would be in the rinning to br Mr Trump’s White House chief of staff or US attorney general.

Text messages and emails shown in court between Mr Davidson and Cohen through 2016 and into the first two years of the Trump administration detailed negotiations that would keep the adult film star’s story of an alleged affair with Mr Trump out of the press during his campaign.

That transaction is at the centre of the criminal case against the former president, who is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records for allegedly reimbursing Cohen and labelling the payments as legal expenses.

Two days of questioning from Manhattan prosecutors sought to have Mr Davidson explain how lawyering works – with often sophisticated and deceptive “technically true” statements that obscure the truth – and to confirm that he believes Mr Trump was funding Cohen to pay off Ms Daniels.

Cross examination from Mr Trump’s defense attorney Emil Bove appeared to try to undermine his