Eric Holder, who was former President Barack Obama's attorney general, took aim at Jeff Sessions, the current attorney general, over Sessions' firing of Andrew McCabe.
"You're the attorney general of the United States. You run the damn Justice Department, you know? And you've got to have the guts to look at the president every now and then and say no," he said during an event at Georgetown University, Politico reported.
"It may be at the end of the day, his separation, his termination is appropriate, but you don't rush that component of it to meet a deadline that I think the president essentially set," Holder added.
Sessions on Friday fired McCabe, the FBI's deputy attorney general, a little more than a day before McCabe would have formally retired from the FBI, Politico's report noted.
On Friday, Holder discussed the firing in a tweet.