WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pleaded guilty on Wednesday and was sentenced to time served as part of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to end his prison sentence.
Assange, an Australian publisher, pleaded guilty Wednesday morning in federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the Pacific. The sentence was handed down by U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona.
The federal plea responded to Assange’s wish to avoid U.S. soil. The arrangement was first disclosed Monday night in a letter from the Justice Department.
Assange arrived at the court on a chartered plane from Britain, where he was imprisoned, accompanied by his legal team and Australian officials.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange agrees to plea deal to avoid prison in US
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (left) is escorted as he arrives at a U.S. courthouse in Saipan, Mariana Islands, on Wednesday to accept a plea deal. (Associated Press)
This comes after Assange has been trying for years to avoid extradition from Britain to the United States to face charges of publishing secret U.S. military documents leaked by a source.
Prior to the plea deal, Assange, 52, 17 charges of violating the Espionage Act He was charged with receiving, possessing and communicating classified information to the public, as well as conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. By reaching a plea deal, he avoided a possible 175 years in a maximum security prison in the United States.
The charges were brought by the Trump administration’s Justice Department after WikiLeaks released leaked cables from U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010, and the Biden administration continued to prosecute them until the plea deal was reached. The cables detailed alleged war crimes committed by the U.S. government in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, as well as instances of CIA involvement in torture and deportation.
The WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” video was also released 14 years ago, showing US troops shooting civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters in the capital, Canberra, on Wednesday that Australia had “taken all appropriate steps to support a positive outcome” in Assange’s case.
“I’ve been very clear as Labor leader and as prime minister that, regardless of your views on Mr Assange’s activities, his case is dragging on,” Mr Albanese said. “Nothing is gained by continuing to imprison him. We want to bring him back to Australia.”
As a condition of his guilty plea, Assange must destroy the classified information he provided to WikiLeaks.
Australian lawmakers mark World Press Freedom Day by writing to President Biden urging him to drop case against Julian Assange
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was the first journalist to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. (Associated Press)
The plea deal required Assange to plead guilty to one felony count, but it spared him imprisonment in the United States and allowed him to return to his family in Australia. Assange’s release was welcomed by his family and supporters, but concerns about press freedom remain as he was forced to admit to working as a journalist.
“It’s good news that the Department of Justice has put an end to this embarrassing case,” Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Foundation for Freedom of the Press, told Fox News Digital, “but it is disturbing that the Biden administration felt the need to extract a guilty plea to the alleged crime of obtaining and publishing government secrets. While this plea deal does not have the precedential effect of a court ruling, it will likely hang over national security reporters for years to come.”
Jennifer Robinson, one of Assange’s lawyers, told reporters that her client’s case “sets a dangerous precedent that journalists around the world should be concerned about.”
“It is a great relief for Julian Assange, his family, friends, his supporters and for us – all those who believe in freedom of speech around the world – that he can return home to Australia and be reunited with his family,” she said.
UK court rules Julian Assange can fully appeal US extradition under First Amendment
Assange is Belmarsh prison, a maximum security prison in London He had been seeking asylum at the embassy since 2012 to avoid being extradited on charges of raping two women after Sweden failed to promise not to extradite him to the U.S. since he was expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy on April 11, 2019, for violating his bail conditions. An investigation into the sexual assault allegations was eventually dropped.
With the end of the case, the Justice Department avoided an appeal hearing in which Assange could challenge his extradition to the US on First Amendment grounds. Assange was granted the right to appeal last month, after his lawyers argued that US guarantees that he would have the same freedom of speech in a US court as an American citizen were “manifestly inadequate.”
Assange said in court on Wednesday that he believes the Espionage Act violates the First Amendment but accepts the consequences of seeking classified information from sources.
He was the first journalist to be indicted under the Espionage Act.
“This is a prosecution that should never have been brought,” Ben Wisner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, told Fox News Digital. “Julian Assange has pleaded guilty to the very essence of investigative journalism about national security, the kind of work journalists do every day: digging around for government secrets and exposing them in the public interest.”
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was released on bail at a secret hearing last week and released from Belmarsh Prison in London on Monday. (Associated Press)
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Mr Assange’s wife Stella told the BBC that she was “over the moon” at the news that her husband would be released after “looking dodgy” for around 72 hours about whether a deal would be reached. Details of the agreement will be made public once it has been approved by a judge.
The WikiLeaks founder was released on bail at a secret hearing last week and left a London prison on Monday. He boarded a plane that landed in Bangkok a few hours later to refuel and fly to the island of Saipan.
The Obama administration decided in 2013 not to prosecute Assange for the 2010 publication of classified documents by WikiLeaks because doing so would have meant prosecuting journalists from major news organizations who had published the same material.
President Obama also Manning’s 35-year sentence commuted Manning, who had been incarcerated since 2010, was sentenced to seven years in prison in January 2017 on charges including Espionage Act violations and was released later that year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
