WASHINGTON (AP) — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty to a crime as part of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice that will release him from prison and end a lengthy legal saga that spanned several continents and centered around the publication of a Treasure trove of secret documentsaccording to court documents filed behind schedule Monday.
Assange is scheduled to appear in federal court in the Mariana Islands, a U.S. state in the western Pacific, to plead guilty under the Espionage Act to conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information, the Justice Department said in a letter filed with the court.
The guilty plea, which must be confirmed by a judge, abruptly ends a criminal case involving international intrigue and the U.S. government’s years-long pursuit of a publisher whose wildly popular secret-sharing website made him a cause célèbre among many press freedom advocates who claimed he acted as a journalist to expose U.S. military wrongdoing. Investigators, however, have repeatedly alleged that his actions broke laws designed to protect classified information and endangered the country’s national security.
He is expected to return to Australia after his confession and sentencing, which is scheduled for Wednesday morning local time on Saipan, the largest island in the Marianas. The hearing is being held there because Assange refuses to travel to the US mainland and the court is so close to Australia.
Assange’s US Attorney Barry Pollack did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.
The deal ensures that Assange admits his guilt while avoiding additional prison time. He had spent years hiding at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after Swedish authorities called for his arrest on rape allegations before he was detained in the UK.
Prosecutors have agreed a sentence for the five years Assange has already spent in a maximum security British prison while fighting to avoid extradition to the US to face charges, a process that has been played out in a series of hearings in London. Last month he won the right to appeal against an extradition order after his lawyers argued that the US government had given him “manifestly inadequate” assurances that he would be afforded the same free speech protections as any American citizen if extradited from the UK.
He is expected to return to Australia after his confession and sentencing, which is scheduled for Wednesday morning local time on Saipan, the largest island in the Marianas. The hearing is being held there because Assange has refused to travel to the US mainland and the court is so close to Australia.
Assange was hailed by many around the world as a hero who exposed military misconduct in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the files released by WikiLeaks was a video of an Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad in 2007 that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
However, his reputation was also damaged by rape allegations, which he denies.
The Justice Department’s indictment published in 2019 accuses Assange of US Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning steal diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks had published in 2010. Prosecutors had accused Assange of endangering national security by publishing documents that harmed the US and its allies and helped their opponents.
The case was sharply criticized by members of the press and Assange supporters. Federal prosecutors defended it by arguing that it targeted conduct that went far beyond that of a journalist gathering information, and amounted to an attempt to amass, steal, and indiscriminately publish classified government documents. The case was brought despite the fact that the Obama administration’s Justice Department had refrained from prosecuting him years earlier.
The agreement comes months later President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia to drop US efforts to prosecute Assange.
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison after being found guilty of violating the Espionage Act and other crimes for leaking classified government and military documents to WikiLeaks. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017, which enabled her release after about seven years in prison.
Assange made headlines in 2016 after he posted on his website emails from Democrats that prosecutors said were stolen by Russian intelligence officials. He was never charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, but the investigation revealed in detail the role the hacking operation played in interfering in that year’s election in favor of then-Republican candidate Donald Trump.
After the documents were released in 2010, Justice Department officials considered bringing charges against Assange, but they were unsure whether this would hold up in court and worried that it might be arduous to justify charging him for actions similar to those of a conventional journalist.
Under the Trump administration, however, the attitude changed: in 2017, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions described Assange’s arrest as a priority.
Assange’s family and supporters said his physical and mental health had deteriorated during more than a decade of legal disputes, This includes seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange sought refuge in Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012 and was granted political asylum after courts in England ruled he should be extradited to Sweden amid a rape investigation in the Scandinavian country. He was arrested by British police after the Ecuadorian government stripped him of his asylum status in 2019, and then jailed for jumping bail when he first sought refuge in the embassy.
Although Sweden eventually closed its sex crimes investigation because so much time had passed, Assange remained in London’s maximum security Belmarsh prison during the extradition dispute with the United States.
