Rice to be national security adviser

NBC News’ Chuck Todd joins Morning Joe to report on the breaking news that Susan Rice has been tapped by President Obama to replace Tom Donilon as National Security Adviser.

By Chuck Todd, Chief White House Correspondent, NBC News

Susan Rice will replace Tom Donilon as national security adviser, the White House is expected to announce Wednesday.

Rice, currently the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, will be formally introduced in her new role by President Barack Obama at 2 p.m. ET. A White House official says Samantha Power, a former special assistant to the president on the National Security Council, will be nominated to replace Susan Rice as the U.N. ambassador.

Republicans who targeted Rice over the handling of the 2012 attacks in Benghazi reacted with the knowledge they have no role in confirming her for the post.  “Obviously I disagree [with Obama’s] appointment of Susan Rice as Nat’l Security Adviser, but I’ll make every effort to work [with] her on [important] issues,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of Rice’s foremost critics on Benghazi, wrote on Twitter.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images file photo

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United States, will be nominated to become the new national security adviser.

The changes mark a significant reshuffle of the White House foreign policy team, which has undergone significant turnover (along with the president’s national security staff) in Obama’s second term.

Rice in particular has been at the center of a political firestorm involving the Obama administration’s early accounts for the terror attack last year against the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which later proved to be incorrect.

Power is not without controversy, either. She stepped down from the Obama campaign after referring to Hillary Clinton, then Obama’s opponent in the Democratic primary, as a “monster.”

Republicans have vocally criticized Rice for emerging on the Sunday morning talk show circuit on the weekend following the Benghazi attack, where she asserted that the attacks were the spontaneous outgrowth of protests related to an anti-Islamic video. In the months since then, senior Republicans have demanded more information about how the talking points provided to Rice were drafted; many in the GOP have suggested the talking points were motivated by electoral politics, since the attack occurred during the height of last fall’s presidential campaign.

The furor was enough to prompt Rice to withdraw her name from consideration to become Obama’s next secretary of state earlier this year.

Had the president nominated Rice to become secretary of state, she would have been forced to undergo bruising confirmation hearings; her new appointment as national security adviser does not require Senate confirmation. She complained about the “very prolonged, very politicized, very distracting and very disruptive” process of confirmation hearings.

Last month, Vice President Joe Biden praised Rice and her role in the Obama administration, saying she had “the absolute, total, complete confidence of the president.”

NBC News’ Michael O’Brien, Alastair Jamieson and Ian Johnston contributed to this report.

This story was originally published on Wed Jun 5, 2013 7:21 AM EDT

Rice to be national security adviser