WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be freed after 5 years in UK prison after accepting US plea deal
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked out of a British prison Monday after accepting a plea deal with the US government that will make him a free man and allow him to avoid incarceration in the States over his leaking of top secret military information.
Assange is expected to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act and receive credit for time served for the five years he spent behind bars in the UK while fighting extradition to the US, according to court documents.
He was freed on bail Monday morning and was later filmed boarding a plane at London Stansted Airport which will take him to Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands for a US federal court hearing on Wednesday morning, a video shared by WikiLeaks on X showed.
Assange, of Australia, will plead guilty to conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information for releasing classified reports of the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on his WikiLeaks site, the US Justice Department said in the court docs filed Monday.
He’s expected to walk away a free man after entering the guilty plea during the court hearing in the Northern Mariana Islands, a commonwealth of the US scheduled for 9 a.m. local time.
Assange, 52, will likely return to Australia after he’s freed — effectively ending the long-drawn-out legal battle between the publisher and the Justice Department which sought to extradite him and try him in the US.
“After more than five years in a 2×3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars,” WikiLeaks said in a statement on X.
The publisher — heralded as a hero journalist who exposed US military abuses by some and a criminal who threatened national security by others — was accused in a federal indictment of aiding US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in stealing hundreds of thousands of classified military files, which WikiLeaks then published online in 2010.
One of the files posted on the site was a 39-minute video of a 2007 helicopter attack in which US forces killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists, and injured children in Baghdad.
“WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions,” WikiLeaks said in a statement. “As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know.”
Assange’s co-conspirator, Manning, was convicted of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was released after about seven when former President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.
Assange has spent the last five years in a high-security British prison after he was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years prior — while hiding from authorities seeking his arrest, both in the US and Sweden, where he was wanted for rape.
Ecuador’s government withdrew his asylum status in 2019, allowing UK police to arrest and hold him during the extradition battle.
News of Assange’s release was celebrated widely across social media, though some criticized the Justice Department for offering him a plea deal with no prison time.
“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,” former Vice President Mike Pence said on X. “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.
“There should be no plea deals to avoid prison for anyone that endangers the security of our military or the national security of the United States. Ever.”
Supporters, on the contrary, said he never should have served time to begin with.
“This should never happened, but finally, Julian Assange is free,” former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said.
“Julian Assange struck a plea deal and will go free! I am overjoyed. He’s a generational hero,” presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy tweeted.
“Julian Assange is set to be released after being held for years for the crime of committing journalism,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X. “Praise God for setting Julian FREE!!”
With Post wires
