The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assangewill plead guilty to a felony in a deal with the US Department of Justice that will free him from prison and resolve a long legal saga that spanned several continents and centered on the publication of a large number of classified documents , according to court documents filed late Monday.
“Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of June 24, after having spent 1,901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted Airport in the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and left the United Kingdom.“, reads a statement from Wikileaks published on its social network account X.
Assange is scheduled to appear in federal court in the Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth located in the Western Pacific, to plead guilty to one Espionage Act charge of conspiring to illegally obtain and disseminate classified national defense information, according to the Department of Justice in a letter filed with the court.
The guilty plea, which must be approved by a judge, abruptly ends a criminal case of international intrigue. Investigators have repeatedly stated that their actions They violated laws intended to protect sensitive information and endangered the country’s national security, while many defenders of press freedom claimed that he acted as a journalist to expose the irregularities of different governments.
He is expected to return to Australia following his guilty plea and sentencing, scheduled for Wednesday morning local time in Saipan, the largest island in the Marianas. The hearing will be held there due to Assange’s opposition to traveling to the continental United States and the court’s proximity to Australia.
The agreement guarantees that Assange will admit his guilt, while freeing him from any additional prison sentence. He has spent years hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London after Swedish authorities called for his arrest over rape allegations before he was locked up in the UK.
Prosecutors have agreed to a sentence of the five years Assange has already spent in a high-security British prison as he fights to avoid extradition to the United States to face the charges, a process that has unfolded in a series of hearings in London. Last month, she won the right to appeal an extradition order after her lawyers argued that the U.S. government provided assurances.manifestly inadequate” that he would have the same free speech protections as a US citizen if extradited from Britain.
He is expected to return to Australia following his guilty plea and sentencing.which is scheduled for Wednesday morning local time on Saipan, the largest island in the Marianas.
Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by US forces in Baghdad, Iraq, in which 11 people were killed, including two journalists from the agency. Reuters.
But his reputation was also tarnished by rape allegations, which he has denied.
The Justice Department indictment unsealed in 2019 accused Assange of encouraging and aiding the US Army intelligence analyst. Chelsea Manning to steal diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks published in 2010. Prosecutors had accused Assange of harming national security by publishing documents that harmed the United States and its allies and aided its adversaries.
The case was criticized by press defenders and Assange supporters. Federal prosecutors argued that this was conduct that went far beyond that of a journalist gathering information, and amounted to an attempt to indiscriminately solicit, steal and publish classified government documents. He filed suit even though the Obama administration’s Justice Department had moved on from prosecuting him years earlier.
The plea deal comes months after President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia for the United States to give up prosecuting Assange.
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison after being convicted of violating the Espionage Act and other crimes for leaking classified government and military documents to WikiLeaks. President Barack Obama commuted his sentence in 2017, allowing his release after about seven years behind bars.
Assange made headlines in 2016 after his website published Democratic emails that prosecutors say were stolen by Russian intelligence agents. He was never charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, but the investigation laid bare in vivid detail the role the hacking operation played in interfering in that year’s election on behalf of then-Republican candidate Donald Trump.
After the documents were released in 2010, Justice Department officials considered bringing charges against Assange, but were unsure whether the case would hold up in court and worried that it might be difficult to justify prosecuting him for acts similar to those of a conventional journalist.
However, the position changed in the Trump administration, and in 2017 former Attorney General Jeff Sessions considered Assange’s arrest a priority.
Assange’s family and supporters have said that his physical and mental health has suffered during more than a decade of legal battlesincluding seven years spent inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012 and was granted political asylum after courts in England ruled that he should be extradited to Sweden as part of a rape investigation in the Scandinavian country. He was detained by British police after the Ecuadorian government withdrew his asylum status in 2019 and then jailed for jumping bail when he first took refuge inside the embassy.
Although Sweden eventually dropped the sex crimes investigation because too much time had passed, Assange has remained in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison during the extradition battle with the United States.
(AP)
