WASHINGTON – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was released from a British prison and on his way to a remote Pacific island on Tuesday, where he will plead guilty to conspiracy charges as part of a deal with the US Justice Department, according to court documents.
The agreement would free Assange and end a years-long legal battle over the publication of classified documents.
Assange was charged with a criminal information — which typically refers to a plea deal — with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, court documents said.
Wikileaks posted footage to X of Assange boarding a plane at Stanstead Airport near London at 5 p.m. (12 p.m. ET) on Monday.
A letter from Justice Department official Matthew McKenzie said Assange will appear in court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US-held territory north of Guam, at 9 a.m. local time Wednesday (7 p.m. ET Tuesday) to plead guilty.
The plane believed to be carrying Assange landed early Tuesday in the Thai capital Bangkok to refuel. He will make his final court appearance after spending five years in a British jail.
The island is 3,400 miles north of Australia, Assange’s country of citizenship, where the Justice Department expects him to return after the trial.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that “the case has dragged on for too long, there is nothing to be gained by continuing to jail him and we want him to be brought home to Australia.”
Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, said in a statement reported by Australian media: “I am grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end. It shows the importance and power of quiet diplomacy.”
His wife, Stella Assange, is now in Australia with their two children, aged 5 and 7, awaiting his arrival, he told BBC Radio 4. “They will be a free man once it is signed by the judge,” he said, adding that he was not sure the deal would happen. until the end of 24 hours.
He said he was “happy.”
Stella Assange, a lawyer, also told the Reuters news agency that she would apologize to her husband. He said accepting a false plea on espionage charges created “deep concern” for journalists around the world.
The US charges against Assange stem from one of the largest disclosures of classified information in American history, which occurred during President Barack Obama’s first term.
Since the end of 2009, according to the government, Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning, a military intelligence analyst, using the WikiLeaks website to reveal tens of thousands of activity reports about the war in Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of reports about the war in Iraq. , hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and summary assessments of detainees at the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Court documents announcing Assange’s plea deal were filed Monday afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands. Assange is expected to appear in court and will be sentenced to 62 months, with credit for time served in a British prison, meaning he will be free to return to Australia, where he was born.
“This was an independent decision made by the Department of Justice and there was no White House involvement in the plea deal decision,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement Monday afternoon.
Assange has been held in high-security Belmarsh prison in east London for five years, and previously spent seven years in self-imposed exile at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London – where he reportedly has two children – until his asylum was withdrawn and he was forced out of the embassy and detained in April 2019.
A superseding indictment was returned more than five years ago, in May 2019, and a second superseding indictment was returned in June 2020.
Assange has been fighting extradition for more than a decade: first in connection with a sex crime case in Sweden that was eventually dismissed, then in connection with a case against him in the United States.
In March, the High Court in London granted permission for a full hearing on the appeal as he sought assurances that he could rely on the First Amendment in a court in the U.S. USA because he is a foreign citizen. A hearing on Assange’s free speech issue has been scheduled for July 9-10.
WikiLeaks also published hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee that disrupted the 2016 presidential race. Russian intelligence officers were later indicted in connection with the hacking in 2018 in a case brought by special counsel Robert Mueller.
In a joint news conference with President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin a few days later, Trump denied the allegations and the intelligence community, saying Putin was “very strong and firm in his denial” that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him. win.
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in military prison, but Obama commuted the sentence on the last day of his presidency in 2017. Manning was subsequently held in contempt of court for nearly a year after he refused to answer questions to the grand jury; he was later released after trying to escape.
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