Nearly 100 Republican lawmakers warned President Barack Obama on Monday against nominating UN envoy Susan Rice to be his next secretary of state, saying she misled Americans over the Benghazi attack.

The 97 Republican House members wrote to Obama to say they were “deeply troubled” he was considering her as a replacement to Hillary Clinton because Rice “propagated a falsehood” about the attack on the US mission in Benghazi.

Rice went on American talk shows five days after the September 11 attack, in which four Americans died including the ambassador to Libya, to suggest it was a “spontaneous” outcome from a protest about an anti-Islam film that spun out of control.

The US administration later acknowledged that intelligence services had from the start considered the incident an act of terrorism involving extremists tied to Al-Qaeda.