The WikiLeaks Assange will be released following a plea agreement on US espionage charges

After a 14-year legal battle in Britain, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is scheduled to enter a guilty plea on Wednesday to charges of breaking US espionage law. This will enable Assange to return to his native Australia.

According to records filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, Assange, 52, has consented to enter a guilty plea to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and leak sensitive U.S. national defense documents.

The agreement puts a stop to a protracted court struggle that saw Assange spend more than five years in a high-security British jail and seven years locked up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London while he sought extradition to the United States, where he was facing eighteen criminal counts.

The U.S. government saw him as a reckless criminal who had put agents’ lives in jeopardy by releasing a massive number of classified U.S. papers on WikiLeaks, the biggest security breech in U.S. military history.

However, he is hailed as a hero by proponents of the free press and his followers, who include celebrities, world leaders, and a number of well-known journalists, for exposing wrongdoing and suspected war crimes while facing persecution for defaming American authorities.

At a hearing on Wednesday at 9 a.m. local time (2300 GMT Tuesday), on Saipan, the Northern Mariana Islands, Assange is scheduled to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served.

Prosecutors claimed that the U.S. territory in the Pacific was selected because of Assange’s resistance to visiting the American mainland and because of its closeness to Australia.

Assange, who was born in Australia, departed Belmarsh Maximum Security Jail early on Monday morning. Stella Assange, his wife, said that he was later granted release by the London High Court and boarded a flight. She stated he was now in Bangkok for a layover.

Stella told Reuters, “I feel elated,” after the couple’s two kids boarded a plane on Sunday and traveled to Australia from London.

“I’m also concerned… I’m concerned until it’s completely approved, but it appears like we’re close.”

Assange was seen signing a paperwork before boarding a private jet in a video that Wikileaks put on X. He was wearing pants and a blue shirt. According to his wife, Assange will take a plane to Canberra, where he will land on Wednesday, following the hearing in Saipan.

Stella Assange claimed that this development sparked negotiations for a settlement because he had just been granted permission to file an appeal against the decision of his U.S. extradition, and the matter was scheduled to be heard at London’s High Court next month.

“TOO LONG”

Under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s leadership, the Australian government has been pressuring US President Joe Biden to free Assange, but they have refrained from commenting on the legal processes while they are still in progress.

In front of the Australian parliament, Albanese declared, “We want him brought home to Australia. There is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration.”

WikiLeaks gained notoriety in 2010 when it made large volumes of diplomatic cables and hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents about Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq available to the public.

A 2007 video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter firing at suspected militants in Iraq, killing twelve people—including two Reuters news team members—was among the more than 700,000 documents found in the cache. 2010 saw the release of that video.

As U.S. Vice President under Donald Trump, Mike Pence stated, “Julian Assange endangered the lives of our troops in a time of war and should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” at the time the accusations against Assange were made.

“The Biden administration’s plea deal with Assange is a miscarriage of justice and dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our Armed Forces and their families,” he stated on X.

Many of Assange’s admirers throughout the world, who have long maintained that he shouldn’t be charged with any of the crimes usually reserved for federal government officials who steal or leak material, were incensed by the charges brought against him.

A lot of people who support press freedom have claimed that prosecuting Assange criminally would endanger journalism and free expression.

Former editor of Britain’s Guardian newspaper, one of the international publications that collaborated with WikiLeaks to publish some of the material stolen, Alan Rusbridger, called it “pretty disturbing” that those who disclosed information inconvenient for states were being targeted by espionage laws.

According to Stella Assange, the US government ought to have given up on the prosecution of her spouse in its entirety.

“We will be seeking a pardon, obviously, but the fact that there is a guilty plea, under the Espionage Act, in relation to obtaining and disclosing national defence information is obviously a very serious concern for journalists,” she stated.

Allegations Made by Swedes

2010 saw Assange’s initial detention in Britain according to a European arrest order, following the announcement by Swedish authorities that they intended to question him on subsequently withdrawn accusations of sex crimes. In order to avoid being extradited to Sweden, he ran away and spent seven years hiding out in Ecuador’s embassy.

During his tenure, he gave birth to two children with Stella, a legal assistant who handled his case. When Ecuador revoked his asylum status in 2019, he was hauled out of the embassy.

Since his imprisonment for failing to appear for bail, he has been residing in Belmarsh and has been battling extradition to the United States.

His brother Gabriel Shipton told Reuters from France that “it is almost time for millions of people who have been advocating for Julian to have a drink and a celebration.”