WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his native Australia on a chartered plane on Wednesday, hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors, ending a protracted legal battle.
The years-long criminal case involving international conspiracy came to a surprise conclusion in highly unusual circumstances when Assange, 52, was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands.
The American commonwealth, in the Pacific Ocean, is relatively close to Assange’s native Australia and accommodated his wish to avoid entering the U.S. mainland.
Assange flew from a London prison to Saipan on a chartered plane, then flew to the Australian capital, Canberra, on the same day.
Accompanying him on the flight were Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, and its high commissioner to the UK, Stephen Smith, who both played key roles in negotiating his release with London and Washington.
Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the flight had been paid for by “team Assange”, adding that his government had played a role in facilitating the transport.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told parliament that the release of Assange, who spent five years in a British prison fighting extradition to the United States, was the result of the government’s “careful, patient and determined work.”
“Over the two years since coming into power, my government has engaged and advocated, including at leadership level, to try to resolve this issue. We have used all appropriate tools,” Mr Albanese said.
Speaking outside the courthouse in Saipan, Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, thanked Albanese “for his statesmanship, principled leadership and diplomacy that made this outcome possible.”
It is unclear where Assange will go from Canberra or what his future plans are.
Stella Assange, a South African lawyer and mother of two, has been in Australia for several days awaiting her husband’s release.
Julian Assange’s other lawyer, Barry Pollack, expected his client to continue his vocal campaign.
“WikiLeaks’ operations will continue and I have no doubt that Mr. Assange will continue to promote free speech and government transparency,” Pollack told reporters outside the courthouse in Saipan.
Speaking ahead of his son’s birth, Assange’s father, John Shipton, said he hoped the unconventional internet publisher would return having awakened to “the great beauty of ordinary life”.
“He’ll be able to spend quality time with his wife Stella and their two children and walk around the beach in winter, feel the sand between his toes and enjoy that lovely cool feeling,” Shipton told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The plea deal required Assange to plead guilty to one felony count but also allowed him to return to Australia without serving time in a US prison.
The judge sentenced him to five years in prison, after he was already serving time in a British prison to face extradition to the United States to face Espionage Act charges that could have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence if convicted. He had previously been held captive in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years.
This conclusion allows both sides to claim some degree of satisfaction.
Facing a defendant who had already served significant prison time, the Justice Department was able to resolve, without a trial, a case that raised thorny legal questions and that may never have reached a jury given the slow pace of the extradition process. Meanwhile, Assange appeared grudgingly satisfied with the settlement, telling the court he believed the Espionage Act violated the First Amendment but would accept the consequences for extracting classified information from sources and publishing it.
The plea deal, revealed in a barely detailed letter issued by the Justice Department on Monday night, marks the latest and perhaps final chapter in the legal battle surrounding the eccentric Australian computer expert who has been hailed by supporters as a fighter for transparency but slammed by national security hardliners who say his actions endangered lives and went far beyond the bounds of traditional journalistic duty.
The criminal case brought by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice concerns the receipt and release of hundreds of thousands of war records and diplomatic cables that contain details of U.S. military misconduct in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Prosecutors alleged that the defendants worked with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to crack passwords on Department of Defense computers to obtain the records, and then released them in disregard for U.S. national security.
According to prosecutors, the information exposed includes the names of people who provided intelligence to U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But his work has garnered significant support from press freedom advocates, who have praised his role in exposing military actions that might have been hidden and warned of a chilling effect on journalists. Among the files released by WikiLeaks is footage of a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
Though the indictment was unsealed in 2019, Assange’s legal troubles began long before the criminal case and continued after it.
A few weeks after the largest trove of documents was released in 2010, Swedish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Assange on charges of rape by one woman and sexual abuse by another. Assange has long maintained his innocence, and the investigation was later dropped.
He went to the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 and applied for asylum, citing political persecution, and spent the next seven years in self-imposed exile there, receiving numerous celebrity visits and regularly appearing from the building’s balcony to address supporters.
In 2019, his host country revoked his asylum grant and allowed British police to arrest him.
Assange has remained in custody for the past five years while the Justice Department sought his extradition, a process that drew skepticism from British judges concerned about how the United States would treat him.
But ultimately, the decision not to send Assange to prison in the United States contradicts long-standing ominous warnings by Assange and his supporters that the U.S. criminal justice system could subject him to unfairly harsh treatment, including the death penalty, which prosecutors never sought.
Last month, Assange won the right to appeal against the extradition order after his legal team argued that US government guarantees that he would have the same freedom of speech as a US citizen if extradited from Britain were “manifestly insufficient”.
His wife, Stella Assange, told the BBC from Australia that she was “over the moon” at the news after more than 72 hours of “hanging by a thread” as to whether a deal would get through.
Assange was granted bail at a secret hearing last week and walked out on Monday from a London prison where he has spent the past five years.
