A supporter of Julian Assange demonstrates outside Westminster Magistrates Court in London, calling for his release from Belmarsh Prison on April 14.
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the US government, ending a years-long international saga over his handling of national security secrets.
Assange prepares to plead guilty this week to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose information related to national defense in a U.S. federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific, according to a new file. court documents.
Under the terms of the deal, Assange faces a sentence of 62 months, equivalent to the time he has already served in Belmarsh prison in the United Kingdom while fighting extradition to the United States. He is expected to be released and return to his home country of Australia following court proceedings later this week.
Australian leaders have been pressuring the Biden administration for years to drop criminal charges. President Biden confirmed during a press conference in April that US authorities were “considering” such a move.
A federal grand jury in Virginia indicted Assange on charges of espionage and computer misuse in 2019, in what the Justice Department described as one of the largest compromises of classified information in American history.
The indictment accused Assange of conspiring with then-military soldier Chelsea Manning to obtain and then release secret reports on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables. Prosecutors said Assange posted these documents on his Wikileaks site without properly scrubbing them of sensitive information, putting informants and others at serious risk of harm.
“No responsible actor, journalist or otherwise, would deliberately publish the names of individuals they knew to be confidential human sources in a war zone, thereby exposing them to the gravest dangers,” said the former deputy attorney general John Demers at the time of this indictment.
Manning was arrested in 2010 and served seven years in prison before President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Assange’s case has attracted support from human rights and journalism groups, including Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists, amid concerns that the case against Assange under the espionage does not set a precedent for charging journalists with crimes against national security.
His interactions with the justice system followed a Byzantine path. Assange spent seven years hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London after Swedish authorities accused him of sexual assault, an arrangement that seemed to frustrate both Assange and his hosts.
Eventually, Swedish police withdrew their charges, but British authorities later arrested him for allegedly breaching bail.
The U.S. government then sought to extradite him, a process that dragged through the courts for years. The plea agreement avoids further legal action regarding the extradition that had been set for early July.
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