WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange agreed on Monday to plead guilty to a felony charge of illegally obtaining and leaking national security material in exchange for his release from a British prison, ending his long and bitter standoff with the United States.
According to a brief court document released late Monday, Assange, 52, has been granted his request and will appear before a federal judge in one of the most remote branches of the federal judiciary: Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. He is expected to be sentenced to about five years in prison, equal to the time he has already served in the United Kingdom, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the terms of the agreement.
It was a final twist in the case of Assange, who has staunchly opposed extradition to the U.S. mainland. The islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the central Pacific, are closer to Assange’s native Australia (where he is a citizen) than to courts in the U.S. mainland or Hawaii.
Shortly after the deal was revealed, WikiLeaks said Assange has left LondonAssange is scheduled to appear in court on Saipan at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday and is expected to fly back to Australia “after the trial is concluded,” Matthew J. McKenzie, an official in the U.S. Justice Department’s counterterrorism division, wrote in a letter to the judge in the case.
On Tuesday morning, his wife Stella Assange Posted a video On Monday, her husband was signing papers and boarding a plane.
Barring any last-minute snags, the deal would end a protracted battle that has raged since Assange was both praised and condemned for leaking state secrets in the 2010s.
These include U.S. military activities in Iraq and Afghanistanalso Confidential cables shared among diplomatsDuring the 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks released Thousands of emails Information stolen from the Democratic National Committee led to Embarrass the other person and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
In 2019, a federal grand jury indicted Assange on 18 counts related to WikiLeaks’ dissemination of a trove of national security documents. They included a trove of material sent to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who handed over information about military planning and operations nearly a decade ago.
If convicted, Assange faces up to 170 years in federal prison. As of Monday evening, Assange was being held at Belmarsh Prison in southeast London, one of the UK’s maximum-security prisons.
According to one report, Assange was kept in his cell for 23 hours a day, eating alone from a tray surrounded by 232 books, and was only allowed to walk around the prison yard for one hour a day. Published in The National this year.
When asked about his pale face, Assange joked: “They call it ‘prison pale’.” For more than a decade, Assange has been unable to go out unsupervised.
His release was not a surprise. Earlier this year, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said U.S. prosecutors needed to wrap up the case, and President Biden has expressed a willingness to resolve it quickly. Senior Justice Department officials accepted a deal to not extend his prison time because Assange has already served longer than most people accused of similar crimes — in this case, more than five years in prison in the UK.
soon The allegations were made public in 2019London’s Metropolitan Police entered the Ecuadorian embassy where Assange had sought asylum years ago to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces sexual assault charges. He has been in custody since then as his legal team has been fighting the Justice Department’s efforts to extradite him.
After weeks of negotiations, Assange pleaded guilty to one charge in the indictment, conspiracy to disseminate national defense information, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Assange and his supporters have long argued that his efforts to obtain and publicly release sensitive national security information are in the public interest and should enjoy the same First Amendment protections as investigative journalists.
Many of Assange’s supporters, while expressing relief at his imminent release, also reiterated the same concerns.
“For the first time in the more than 100-year history of the Espionage Act, this is a conviction under the Espionage Act for basic journalistic reporting,” said David Greene, director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that focuses on First Amendment issues.
“These charges should never have been brought,” he said.
2021a coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups urged the Biden administration to abandon its efforts to extradite him from the United Kingdom and prosecute him, saying the case “poses a serious threat” to press freedom.
The group argued that most of the conduct he was accused of was “routine conduct of journalists.” “News organizations routinely and necessarily release confidential information in order to inform the public about events of great public significance.”
But U.S. officials argue that Assange’s actions went far beyond news coverage and compromised national security. Prosecutors claim that the material Manning provided endangered the lives of service members and Iraqis who collaborated with the military and made it harder for the country to respond to external threats.
Assange remains in Belmarsh Prison as he repeatedly protests against his deportation order. Won appeal against extradition order.
Later, Ms Assange, who married Mr Assange after joining his legal team fighting the extradition of Syrian refugees to Sweden, told supporters gathered outside the central London court that the case should be dropped.
“The Biden administration should distance itself from this disgraceful prosecution,” said Ms. Assange, who secretly developed a relationship with Mr. Assange while he lived in the Ecuadorian embassy. The two have two young sons.
Assange’s case has been bogged down in court due to health issues, so he has rarely appeared in public. In 2021, Assange suffered a mild stroke in prison. He did not attend the hearing in May for undisclosed health reasons. In another video posted to social media earlier on Tuesday, Assange said, Recorded outside Belmarsh Prison last weekHe said the situation was developing very quickly.
“I am now convinced that this period in our lives is over,” she said. “Now, with Julian free, a new chapter is about to begin.”
