Clemency for Peltier Likely to Fail

President Clinton appears ready to reject convicted killer Leonard Peltier’s bid for clemency, but the debate over the Native American 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 hard for Clinton to reject pleas from Hollywood, Native American 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.

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.

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

Friend Sees Defeat Setting Back Relations

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 Native Americans 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.

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 by name. “The manner in which [Freeh] offered his advice, by leaking it through [Capitol Hill] rather than by even bothering to send it over here to the White House, was just small-minded.”

An FBI spokesman denied the White House version of events, saying that Freeh’s recommendation on clemency was hand-delivered to the White House on Dec. 5.

But the fact that Clinton and Freeh have had trouble working together on an issue as fundamental as a presidential pardon indicates that, in the closing weeks of the administration, relations between the two are even more fractured than many realized.

The tension is attributable in large part to Freeh’s repeated position that an independent counsel should have investigated alleged campaign finance abuses by the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign.

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.”

On Friday, more than 300 FBI agents marched on the White House demanding that Clinton reject Peltier’s request for clemency.

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.”

But it’s unclear whether Clinton ever received that letter. Its contents immediately became public--and White House staffers said they learned about it only after it was posted on the Web site of Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), head of the House Judiciary Committee.

“That didn’t go unremarked on by the president,” the White House official said. “That has become standard operating procedure [by Freeh]. . . . Rather than a serious note delivered to [Clinton], it gets laundered through a Republican.”

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 he was framed--was convicted, and two other men were acquitted.

Clinton Finds Governor Persuasive

In their conversation at the White House, Janklow told Clinton that he believes Peltier essentially executed the two FBI agents, who had been wounded in the initial shootout.

Clinton “understands that a lot of the voices on this are strong and fierce on both sides and he wanted to take a closer look at the facts” by speaking with Janklow, the White House official said.

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

But Janklow, who was unavailable for comment on the White House meeting, is not without his critics. He lost a libel suit against the publisher of “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,” a critically acclaimed 1983 book about the incident at Pine Ridge. Janklow said the book depicted him as a drunk, a racist, a bigot and even a rapist.

Bruce Ellison, an attorney for Peltier for the last 25 years, said that some of Janklow’s more recent actions as governor have only exacerbated tensions with the Native American community.

Janklow “has not been a particular friend of the Native American people . . . “ Ellison said. “Hopefully, the president will learn more about his biases and his partisan nature” before deciding the clemency issue.