OAN’s Brooke Mallory
Monday, June 24, 2024 6:10pm
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is set to plead guilty to conspiracy charges this week in a plea deal with the US Department of Justice that will see him released after serving a five-year sentence in a British prison, according to court documents.
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According to court documents, Assange is charged with conspiring to collect and disclose material related to national defense through “criminal intelligence.”
In a letter to Judge Ramona Manglona of the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, Department of Justice attorney Matthew McKenzie said Assange will plead guilty in court at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday or 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday. The Justice Department also said Assange plans to return to Australia, where he is a citizen, after his trial.
The US filed suit against Assange following the largest leak of classified documents in US history, which occurred during then-President Barack Obama’s first term.
The government alleges that beginning in late 2009, Assange and military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning conspired to use his website, WikiLeaks, to publish hundreds of thousands of reports on the Iraq War, tens of thousands of operational reports on the Afghanistan war, hundreds of thousands of State Department cables, and assessment summaries of Guantanamo Bay detainees.
On Monday night, court documents detailing Assange’s formal plea deal were filed with the US District Court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific Ocean. Assange was expected to appear in court and receive a 62-month sentence, minus any time he has served in a UK prison, and be free to return to his country of birth.
Assange lived in exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years, where he reportedly fathered two children, but was arrested in April 2019 after his asylum grant was revoked.
He is currently being held in the maximum security Belmarsh prison outside London.
An indictment was filed against Assange more than five years ago, in May 2019, and a second indictment was filed in June 2020.
Assange has been fighting extradition to the US for more than a decade. He sought guarantees he could rely on the First Amendment in his US trial, and in March the High Court in London gave permission for his appeal to be heard in full.
Assange’s free speech hearing has been set for July 9th.Number-TenNumber.
Manning, meanwhile, was sentenced to 35 years in prison and served time in a military prison, but President Obama commuted his sentence at the end of his term in 2017. Manning was later found guilty of contempt of court for refusing to answer questions from a grand jury and spent nearly a year in custody before attempting suicide in 2020.
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