WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to plead guilty to violating espionage law

Washington — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act and is expected to appear in a U.S. courtroom in the Northern Mariana Islands in the coming days, court records showed Monday .

The guilty plea, expected to be finalized on Wednesday, will resolve outstanding legal issues between Assange and the US government. Justice Department prosecutors recommended a prison sentence of 62 months as part of the plea deal, CBS News has learned, which is high for a single count violation. Assange would not spend time in U.S. custody because, under the plea deal, he would receive credit for the approximately five years he spent in a British prison. fight against extradition in the USA

In a letter to the federal judge on Monday, the Justice Department said Assange was opposed to traveling to the continental United States to plead guilty. The Justice Department expects Assange to return to Australia after the hearing.

Assange, an Australian national, was indicted in 2019 by a federal grand jury in Virginia with more than a dozen charges alleging he illegally obtained and disseminated classified information about the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on his WikiLeaks website. Prosecutors at the time accused him of recruiting individuals to “hack computers and/or illegally obtain and disclose classified information.”

He is expected to plead guilty to a charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.

His lawyer declined to comment.

One of its best-known recruits, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, was convicted in the 2010 leak of hundreds of thousands of sensitive military documents to WikiLeaks, which officials say was one of the largest disclosures of secret government documents in history. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison and in 2017, former President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.

Assange was accused of working with Manning to find the password to a Defense Department computer system that stored sensitive files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as hundreds of detainee evaluation files of Guantanamo Bay.

Federal prosecutors also accused Assange of publishing the names of “individuals around the world who provided information to the U.S. government under circumstances in which they could reasonably expect their identities to remain confidential.”

Assange had previously denied any wrongdoing. He and his supporters argued that the charges should never have been brought because he was acting as a journalist and reporting on government actions.

He has been detained in the United Kingdom since 2019 and has launched a years-long legal effort to resist extradition to the United States and face federal charges. The expected guilty plea ends the intercontinental legal battle.

In May, the WikiLeaks founder won his appeal against his extradition to the United States on espionage charges after a British court asked the U.S. government earlier this year to ensure Assange would benefit from free speech protections under the U.S. Constitution and that he would not face the death penalty if convicted of espionage.

President Biden said in April he was “considering” a request from Australia to allow Assange to return to his homeland, which called on the United States to drop charges against him.

Assange has been facing legal troubles for more than a decade, since 2010, when a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant over allegations of rape and sexual assault by two women, which Assange denied. Facing extradition to Sweden, he sought political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he lived for seven years until his deportation in 2019.

Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation into Assange in 2017 and an international arrest warrant for him was withdrawn, but he was still wanted by British police for skipping bail when he entered the embassy.

At the start of 2019, Ecuador became angry with its London host, accusing him of smearing his excrement on the walls and attacking his guards.

“He has exhausted our patience and pushed our tolerance to the limit,” said Lenin Moreno, then president of Ecuador. said. Moreno accused Assange of being an “informational terrorist” disclose information “according to its ideological commitments”.

At the request of the US government, British police arrested Assange on April 11, 2019 at the embassy after Ecuador terminated his asylum. At that time, he was facing charges in the United States related to the 2010 leak.

WikiLeaks was a key player in the 2016 presidential election, releasing 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, although they were not indicted for their conduct in 2016.

Priscilla Saldana contributed reporting.