President Donald Trump. Jonathan Drake/Reuters President Donald Trump is losing patience with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, The New York Times reported on Monday evening.

Citing people close to Trump, The Times said the president was incensed by the Justice Department's handling of his now-blocked travel ban and Sessions' decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation — a move that ultimately led to the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel in charge of the inquiry.

Trump was caught off-guard by Sessions' recusal and learned of it "when he was in the middle of another event," Times reporters Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman wrote.

A day after learning of Sessions' recusal, Trump took his anger out on aides at the Oval Office, The Times said, citing four people familiar with the incident. The Times said it was after that incident when Trump tweeted his widely debunked claim that President Barack Obama had ordered a wiretapping operation at Trump Tower.

On Monday morning, Trump directly criticized the Department of Justice for its handling of his executive order barring travel to the US from several majority-Muslim countries that was twice struck down nationwide by appeals courts. Trump's social-media outrage against the DOJ continued Monday evening after people close to his administration openly criticized him for it.

"They wholly undercut the idea that there is some rational process behind the president's decisions," former acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger said in the Times report. "I believe it is unprecedented for a president to publicly chastise his own Justice Department."

Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School, offered a potential explanation of Trump's DOJ-targeted tweets. "What he's saying is, 'I'm the president, I'm the tough guy, I wanted a very tough travel ban and the damn lawyers are weakening it' — and clients complain about lawyers all the time," Dershowitz said in an interview with The Times. "I see this more as a client complaining about his lawyer. The lawyer in this case happens to be Jeff Sessions."