Washington – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act and is expected to appear in a US court in the Northern Mariana Islands in the coming days, court records revealed.
The guilty plea, which will be finalized on Wednesday, will end Assange’s outstanding legal problems with the US government. Justice Department prosecutors recommended a prison sentence of 62 months in custody as part of a plea agreement, CBS News has learned, the maximum for a single-count offense. Assange will not spend time in US custody because, under the plea agreement, he will receive credit for about five years in a British prison. against extradition to the US
In a letter to a federal judge on Monday, the Justice Department said Assange opposed traveling to the continental US to enter a guilty plea. The Department of Justice expects Assange to return to Australia after the court hearing.
Assange, an Australian citizen, was indicted in 2019 by a federal grand jury in Virginia on more than a dozen charges alleging that he obtained and disseminated classified information about America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the WikiLeaks website. Prosecutors at the time accused him of recruiting individuals to “hack into computers and/or illegally obtain and disclose confidential information.”
He is set to plead guilty to charges of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.
His attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One of the most prominent recruits, US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, was blamed for the 2010 leak of hundreds of thousands of sensitive military records to WikiLeaks, which officials say is one of the largest disclosures of classified government records in history. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison and in 2017, former President Barack Obama commuted his sentence.
Assange is accused of working with Manning to unlock passwords to Defense Department computer systems that stored sensitive records about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well as hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment summaries.
Federal prosecutors also accused Assange of publishing the names of “people around the world who provided information to the US government in circumstances where they could reasonably expect their identities to be kept confidential.”
Assange has previously denied any wrongdoing. He has been detained in the UK since 2019 and has launched legal efforts over the years to refuse extradition to the US to face federal charges. The guilty plea is expected to end the intercontinental court battle.
In May, the founder of WikiLeaks won a bid to appeal his extradition to the US on espionage charges after a British court asked the US government earlier this year to guarantee that Assange would be given the protection of free speech under the US Constitution and that he would not be. given the death penalty if convicted of espionage.
President Biden said in April he was “considering” a request from Australia to return Assange to his home country, which asked the US to drop the case against him.
Assange has faced legal problems for more than a decade, starting in 2010 when Swedish prosecutors issued arrest warrants in connection with allegations of rape and sexual assault by two women, which Assange denied. Faced with extradition to Sweden, he requested political asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he lived for seven years until his expulsion in 2019.
Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation into Assange in 2017 and the international arrest warrant for him was withdrawn, but he is still wanted by British police because he did not have bail when he entered the embassy.
In early 2019, Ecuador became upset with London houseguests, accusing them of smearing feces on the walls and assaulting guards.
“They tired our patience and pushed our tolerance to the limit,” Lenin Moreno, who was president of Ecuador at the time, said. Moreno accused Assange of being a selective “information terrorist”. release information “according to ideological commitment.”
At the request of the US government, British police arrested Assange on April 11, 2019, at the embassy after Ecuador ended asylum. At the time, he was facing charges in the US in connection with the 2010 leak.
WikiLeaks was a key player in the 2016 presidential election, publishing thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee that had been stolen by Russian government hackers. WikiLeaks and Assange are mentioned hundreds of times in special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Priscilla Saldana contributed reporting.
