WASHINGTON : US National security adviser Thomas Donilon will resign his post, White House officials said Wednesday, and be replaced by UN Ambassador Susan Rice, a close confidant of President Barack Obama.
Rice, 48, has been a target of Republican criticism for presenting an erroneous account of the attacks on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The post of national security adviser does not require Senate confirmation.  White House officials said Donilon’s resignation will take effect in early July.
Earlier this year, she withdrew her name from consideration to become secretary of state.  Republicans on Capitol Hill have accused Rice of misleading the public over the nature of the attacks in an attempt to protect Obama from criticism during a difficult reelection campaign.
White House officials said Obama will nominate Samantha Power to replace Rice at the United Nations. Power, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “A Problem from Hell,” about the U.S. response to genocide, served as a senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights on the National Security Council during Obama’s first term and the start of his second.
Her nomination to become ambassador to the United Nations also has been much-anticipated. Unlike the security adviser job, it will require Senate confirmation.
Some of Rice’s toughest critics have said they are prepared to move on and work with her if, as expected, Donilon resigns and she is tapped to replace him.
 “She’s going to have her plate full if she’s chosen,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican. “I will not be petty. I will put my differences on Benghazi aside and work with her.”
But Republicans could decide to launch a fight against Ms. Power, whose book generated considerable reaction by focusing on what she deemed America’s moral failure to act in the face of modern genocides in Africa and the Balkans, according to The Washington Post.
Power said the United States applied double standards — what she termed a la cartism — in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Washington complained about a “shortage of democracy in Palestine, but not in Pakistan,” she reportedly wrote, and bombed Serbs in defence of ethnic Albanians but said nothing about Russian excesses in Chechnya.
Power argued that the United States’ international standing and credibility required that Washington also confront the darker chapters of its foreign policy past — CIA-backed coups in Guatemala, Chile and Congo, for example, or the doubling of U.S. financial assistance to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein the year he gassed the Kurds.
 “We need a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, permitted by the United States,” she wrote.
Power has also turned her no-holds-barred commentary on the United Nations itself, writing in the New Republic in 2003, “The U.N. Security Council is anachronistic, undemocratic, and consists of countries that lack the standing to be considered good faith arbiters of how to balance the stability against democracy, peace against justice, and security against human rights.”
Donilon, a seasoned Washington insider, has held senior national security posts in the administration since Obama took office, rising from the principal deputy national security adviser to his current job.
His reputation for trying to protect Obama politically has caused friction with other agencies over the years, beginning in the fall of 2009, when he advocated for a far smaller deployment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan than the Pentagon had requested, the Post said.
Executing the administration’s shift to a stronger focus on Asia in its foreign policy has been one of Donilon’s primary policy initiatives; his resignation is timed to follow the summit meeting he helped organize between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping this weekend.