WikiLeaks’ Assange to be freed after pleading guilty to US Espionage Act charge

WASHINGTON - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is due to plead guilty on June 26 to violating US espionage law, in a deal that will set him free after a 14-year British legal odyssey and allow his return home to Australia.

Assange, 52, has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents, according to filings in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.

The deal marks the end of a legal saga that has seen Assange spend more than five years in a British high-security jail and seven holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London as he fought accusations of sex crimes in Sweden and battled extradition to the US, where he faced 18 criminal charges.

The US government viewed him as a reckless villain who had endangered the lives of agents through WikiLeaks’ mass release of secret US documents – the largest security breach of its kind in US military history.

But to free-press advocates and his supporters, who included world leaders, celebrities and some prominent journalists, he is a hero for exposing wrongdoing and alleged war crimes, and was persecuted for embarrassing the US authorities.

At 9am local time on June 26, at a hearing in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, Assange is due to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served.

The US territory in the Pacific was chosen due to Assange’s opposition to travelling to the mainland US and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.

Australian-born Assange

left Belmarsh maximum-security jail

in the early hours of June 24, before being bailed by the London High Court and later boarding a flight, his wife, Mrs Stella Assange, said. He was currently on a stopover in Bangkok, she said.

“I feel elated,” Mrs Assange, who flew to Australia from London on June 23 with the couple’s two children, told Reuters.

“I also feel worried... Until it’s fully signed off, I worry, but it looks like we’ve got there. I’ll really believe it when I have him in front of me and I can take him and hug him, and then it will be real.”

A video posted on X by Wikileaks showed Assange dressed in a blue shirt and jeans signing a document before boarding a private jet.

After the hearing in Saipan, Assange will fly to Canberra where he will arrive on June 26, his wife said.

He recently won permission to appeal against the approval of his US extradition and the case was due to be heard at London’s High Court in July, a factor that Mrs Assange said helped galvanise talks over a deal.

The Australian government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has been pressing for Assange’s release but declined to comment on the legal proceedings as they were ongoing.

“There is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration, and we want him brought home to Australia,” Mr Albanese said in the country’s Parliament.

A lawyer for Assange did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Historic charges

WikiLeaks came to prominence in 2010 after it released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with swathes of diplomatic cables.

The trove of more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts such as a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.

“Julian Assange endangered the lives of our troops in a time of war and should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said Mr Mike Pence, who served as US vice-president under Donald Trump when the charges were brought against Assange.

“The Biden administration’s plea deal with Assange is a miscarriage of justice and dishonours the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our armed forces and their families,” he said on X.

The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many global supporters, who have long argued that he, as the publisher of WikiLeaks, should not face charges typically used against federal government employees who steal or leak information.

Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange is a threat to free speech and journalism.

Mr Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of Britain’s Guardian newspaper, one of the global titles which worked with WikiLeaks to publish some of the leaked material, said it was “pretty disturbing” that espionage laws were being used to target those who revealed uncomfortable information for states.

Mrs Assange said the US government should have dropped the case against her husband altogether.

“We will be seeking a pardon, obviously, but the fact that there is a guilty plea under the Espionage Act in relation to obtaining and disclosing national defence information, is obviously a very serious concern for journalists,” she said.

Long odyssey

Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after the Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex-crime allegations that were later dropped.

He fled to Ecuador’s embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.

He and Mrs Assange, a lawyer who worked on his case, had two children during his time there. He was dragged out of the embassy in 2019 after Ecuador withdrew his asylum status.

He was jailed for skipping bail and has been in Belmarsh ever since, latterly fighting extradition to the US.

“Millions of people have been advocating for Julian; it is almost time for them to have a drink and a celebration,” his brother Gabriel Shipton told Reuters from France. REUTERS