The nearly 15 year-long legal saga of Julian Assange, the polarizing WikiLeaks founder, will apparently end with a plea deal. Assange, who has been in British custody since 2019 on United States espionage and conspiracy charges, agreed Monday to plead guilty to one felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material, and was en route Tuesday to the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory north of Australia, to enter his plea. He is expected to be sentenced to the five years he already served in the UK, allowing him to return to Australia, his home country, this week.
“Julian Assange is free,” WikiLeaks said in a statement Monday, confirming that he had been released from the prison, where he’d been held the last five years while fighting extradition to the US. “Julian’s freedom is our freedom.”
Assange rose to international prominence in 2010, when his organization published materials leaked by Chelsea Manning related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which included footage of a 2007 US airstrike on Baghdad that killed two Reuters journalists and other civilians. (Manning spent seven years in jail until her sentence was commuted by then-President Barack Obama in 2017.) One of the biggest military leaks in US history, the materials gave the public an “unvarnished and grim picture” of the war in Afghanistan, as the New York Times put it at the time, and pulled back the curtain on US military abuses during the war in Iraq.
By the 2010s, Assange—who spent seven years living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden over alleged sexual assault, an investigation that was later dropped—was already a controversial figure. But his reputation was further complicated in 2016, when WikiLeaks published troves of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta, that suggested the party brass showed favor to Clinton over progressive Bernie Sanders in the primary. The leaks—which WikiLeaks began publishing the same day the Access Hollywood tape emerged of Donald Trump boasting that he had groped women—exacerbated divisions within the Democratic Party, and drew praise from the Republican nominee. “I love WikiLeaks,” he said on the campaign trail.
To his supporters, Assange was a crusading whistleblower; to his detractors, he was a national security threat aiding Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. He was taken into UK custody in 2019, on US charges of violating the Espionage Act. He faced life in prison.
The release of Assange—whose prosecution raised concerns among many journalists and news organizations like the Times, which was among the major outlets to call for some charges to be dropped—was praised by press freedom advocates, who suggested the plea deal could have “grave implications for journalists.” “While we welcome the end of his detention, the US’s pursuit of Assange has set a harmful legal precedent by opening the way for journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they receive classified material from whistleblowers,” said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “This should never have been the case.”
The ordeal, which spanned three presidencies, comes to an end after the Australian government pushed for the US to end its prosecution—something Joe Biden acknowledged in April was under consideration. As Assange was set to return to Australia this week, James Clapper—who served as the director of national intelligence in 2010, when the Manning leaks were published—said justice had been “served” in the matter. Assange, Clapper told CNN on Tuesday, “has sort of, you know, paid his dues.”
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