Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty to US criminal charges as part of a deal allowing him to go free, according to court documents. Assange, 52, was charged with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information. The US has argued that the Wikileaks files, which disclosed information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, endangered lives.
Assange has spent the last five years in a British prison, fighting extradition to the US. According to CBS, Assange will spend no time in US custody and will receive credit for the time spent incarcerated in the UK. He will return to Australia, according to a letter from the Justice Department.
The deal, which will see him plead guilty to one charge, is expected to be finalized in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday, 26 June. The remote Pacific islands, a US commonwealth, are much closer to Australia than US federal courts in Hawaii or the continental US.
A spokesperson for Australia’s government told Agence France-Presse that the case had “dragged on for too long.” Assange’s attorney, Richard Miller, declined to comment when contacted by CBS. The BBC has also contacted his US-based lawyer. He and his lawyers had long claimed that the case against him was politically motivated.
In April, US President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia to drop the prosecution against Assange. In a victory the following month, the UK High Court ruled that Assange could bring a new appeal against extradition to the US, allowing him to challenge US assurances over how his prospective trial would be conducted and whether his right to free speech would be infringed. After the ruling, his wife Stella told reporters that the Biden administration “should distance itself from this shameful prosecution.”
US prosecutors originally wanted to try Assange on 18 counts, mostly under the Espionage Act, over the release of confidential US military records and diplomatic messages related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wikileaks, founded by Assange in 2006, claims to have published over 10 million documents in what the US government later described as “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”
In 2010, the website published a video from a US military helicopter showing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters news reporters, being killed in Baghdad. One of Assange’s most well-known collaborators, US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, was sentenced to 35 years in prison before then-President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.
Assange also faced separate charges of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, which he denied. He spent seven years hiding in Ecuador’s London embassy, claiming the Swedish case would lead to his extradition to the US. Swedish authorities dropped the case in 2019, citing the passage of time, but UK authorities later took him into custody for not surrendering to the courts for extradition to Sweden.
Even amid long-running legal battles, Assange has rarely been seen in public and has reportedly suffered from ill health, including a small stroke in prison in 2021.
