WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is due to plead guilty on Wednesday to violating an American espionage law, in a deal that will set him free after a 14-year British legal battle.
Mr. Assange,52, left prison in London early Monday and was bailed by the London High Court and is en route to Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, wife his wife, Stella Assange said. He is due to be sentenced to 62 months of time that he already served in London early Wednesday morning.
The Australian Wikileaks publisher has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. national defense documents, according to filings in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
The deal marks the end of a legal sag that that has seen him spend more than five years in a British high-security jail and seven years in refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London while he fought accusations of sex crimes in Sweden and extradition to the U.S., which had 18 criminal charges against him.
The U.S. government viewed him as a reckless criminal who had endangered the lives of agents through the mass leak of Wikileaks of secret U.S. documents which was the largest security breach in U.S. military history.
But free press advocates and his supporters, including celebrities and some prominent journalists, called him a hero for exposing wrongdoing and alleged war crimes. They claimed he was persecuted for embarrassing U.S. authorities.
„I feel elated,” wife Stella Assange told Reuters. She flew to Australia from London on Sunday with the couple’s two children.
„I also feel worried … Until it’s fully signed off, I worry, but it looks like we’ve got there.”
A video posted on X by Wikileaks showed Assange dressed in a blue shirt and jeans signing a document before boarding a private jet. After the hearing in Saipan, Assange will fly to Canberra where he will arrive on Wednesday, his wife said.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has been pressing U.S. President Joe Biden for Mr. Assange’s release but declined to comment on the legal proceedings as they were ongoing.
WikiLeaks came to prominence in 2010 after it released hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with realms of diplomatic cables.
The trove of more than 700,000 documents included battlefield accounts such as a 2007 video of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.
„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,” said Mike Pence, who served as U.S. Vice President under Donald Trump when the charges were brought against Assange.
Mr.Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex-crime allegations that were later dropped. He fled to Ecuador’s embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.
