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Washington — President Clinton appears ready to reject convicted killer Leonard Peltier's bid for clemency, but the debate about the American-Indian activist's future has inflamed already tense relations between the White House and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, officials said Wednesday.

Freeh has been lobbying for Clinton to reject pleas from Hollywood, American Indian groups and civil-rights leaders for a pardon for Peltier, who is imprisoned for the murders of two FBI agents on a South Dakota Indian reservation in 1975.

American Indians said they remain confident that Peltier will be freed because he is an innocent man.

Ernie Stevens Jr., a close friend of Peltier who is on the executive committee of the National Congress of American Indians, said that pardoning Peltier would remove a "black eye in an ugly era" that many American Indians hope to move past. If Clinton rejects that bid, "I think it really sets us back in tribal-United States relations," said Stevens, who lives in Temecula, Calif.

But White House sources said that Clinton is leaning strongly toward rejecting the clemency request within the next week or so not because of Freeh's recommendation but in part on the basis of information from others familiar with the case.

In fact, Clinton and White House staff members were so unimpressed by Freeh's recommendation and the manner in which it was leaked to congressional Republicans that the advice has been virtually discarded, according to a senior White House official familiar with the clemency discussions.

"Freeh's credibility on this issue is not particularly high, and his ability to sway the president is not particularly high," said the official, who asked not to be identified.

Paul Bresson, a spokesman at FBI headquarters in Washington, declined to discuss relations between the White House and the FBI in the Peltier case.

"I don't think that's something we're really interested in pursuing," he said. "This whole thing has nothing to do with personal relationships between the FBI and the White House. It has everything to do with the justice system and seeing that everything prosecutors have worked to accomplish (in Peltier's conviction) does not get undone."

In a Dec. 5 letter addressed to Clinton, Freeh argued passionately against freeing Peltier, saying: "Mr. President, there is no issue more deeply felt within the FBI."

Just a few days after Freeh's letter was written, Clinton sat down in the Oval Office with South Dakota Gov. William Janklow.

A Republican, Janklow was South Dakota's attorney general in 1975 when violence erupted at the Pine Ridge Reservation. Two FBI agents who had gone onto the reservation in search of a robbery suspect were killed. Peltier whose supporters say was framed was convicted, and two other men were acquitted.

The president "found the case that Janklow made very persuasive," the White House official said. "He was seen as a credible, important point of view. ... He made a very convincing case in a way that Freeh never could."