WASHINGTON (AP) — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty to a crime as part of a deal with the U.S. Justice Department that will allow him to be released and resolve a lengthy legal saga that spanned multiple continents and centered on the publication of a trove of classified documents.
Assange left a British prison on Monday and will appear later this week in U.S. federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. state in the western Pacific. He is expected to plead guilty to conspiring under the Espionage Act 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 his native Australia after his confession and sentencing, which is scheduled for Wednesday morning local time on Saipan, the largest island in the Northern Mariana Islands. The hearing is being held there because Assange refuses to travel to the U.S. mainland and the court is close to Australia, prosecutors said.
Assange’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
In a statement posted on X, WikiLeaks said Assange boarded a plane and left the United Kingdom on Monday after leaving the British prison where he had spent the past five years. WikiLeaks welcomed the announcement of the agreement, saying it was grateful to “everyone who stood by us, fought for us and fought with all their might for his freedom.”
“WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories about government corruption and human rights abuses and held the powerful to account for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid a high price for those principles and for people’s right to know,” WikiLeaks said.
The deal ensures that Assange admits his guilt but also avoids additional prison time. He had been hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for years after Swedish authorities demanded his arrest on rape charges before he was jailed in the UK.
Assange is expected to serve the five-year sentence he has already served in the maximum-security British prison while he tries 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 was given the right to appeal an extradition order after his lawyers argued the US government had given him “manifestly inadequate” assurances that he would enjoy the same free speech protections as an American citizen if extradited from the UK.
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, released in 2019, accuses Assange of encouraging and helping U.S. intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal diplomatic cables and military records that WikiLeaks published in 2010. Prosecutors had accused Assange of endangering national security by publishing documents that harmed the U.S. and its allies and helped its opponents.
In an indictment filed in connection with the agreement, prosecutors said Assange conspired with Manning to obtain documents, notes, and other writings related to national defense and to “arbitrarily disclose” those materials. The document specifically notes that Assange “was not a U.S. citizen, did not hold a U.S. security clearance, and was not authorized to possess, access, or control any documents, papers, or notes related to the national defense of the United States, including classified information.”
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 after President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia to drop U.S. efforts to prosecute Assange. The White House was not involved in the decision to settle Assange’s case, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
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, allowing her to be released after about seven years behind bars.
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 tough 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 suffered during more than a decade of legal battles, including seven years spent in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 and was granted political asylum after courts in England ruled he should be extradited to Sweden as part of a rape investigation in the Scandinavian country. He was arrested by British police after the Ecuadorian government stripped him of 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.
___ Tucker reported from Fort Pierce, Fla. Associated Press writer Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.
