Former Attorney General Eric Holder urged Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday to take greater ownership of internal personnel decisions, | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo Holder: Sessions has to ‘have the guts’ to ‘say no’ to Trump

Former Attorney General Eric Holder says Jeff Sessions needs to “to have the guts” to stand up to President Donald Trump, suggesting the Justice Department leader may have rushed to fire former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe at the president’s behest.

Holder, who led the department under former President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2015, urged Sessions on Monday to take greater ownership of internal personnel decisions, questioning the decision to dismiss McCabe amid criticisms of the FBI leader from Trump.


“It may be that 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 said during an event at Georgetown University.

Sessions on Friday fired the FBI’s former No. 2 a little over a day before he was set to formally retire from the bureau, a move that sparked a public war of words between McCabe and the president.

Sessions said the dismissal was prompted by internal reviews that found McCabe had violated Justice Department policies and had not been forthcoming regarding the probe into the FBI's actions before the 2016 presidential election, including their investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails.

McCabe has denied any wrongdoing.

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Holder, who was succeeded by former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and then Sessions at the Justice Department, framed the dismissal of McCabe as premature and urged the sitting attorney general to challenge Trump when necessary.

“If you’re the attorney general of the United States, you run the damn Justice Department, you know?” Holder said. “And you’ve got to have the guts to look at the president every now and again and say no.”

The White House said last week that any decision on McCabe’s status would be left to Sessions, though press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders expressed concern over the former FBI deputy’s actions.

“We do think it is well documented that he has had some very troubling behavior and by most accounts a bad actor and should have some cause for concern,” Sanders said at a press briefing Thursday.