Wikileaks founder Julian Assange agreed to plead guilty Monday to a felony count of illegally disseminating national security material in a deal with the U.S. Justice Department, according to court documents. In exchange, Assange will be released from a British prison after five years behind bars.
Assange is scheduled to appear in federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth, at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday, to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to unlawfully obtain and disclose classified national defense information, an Espionage Act charge, according to a letter from Justice Department official Matthew McKenzie to U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona. He’s expected to be sentenced to 62 months, with credit for time served in British prison. The Justice Department expects Assange to return to his native Australia following his court appearance.
The plea, which must be approved by a judge, will bring to an end a years-long battle that began in late 2009 when, according to the government, Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning, a military intelligence analyst, to obtain and subsequently publish secret reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables on his Wikileaks website. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2019 on 17 counts of espionage and one charge of computer misuse related to WikiLeaks’ dissemination of the material. If convicted, Assange could have faced a maximum of 170 years in a federal prison.
Human rights and journalist groups had long urged the Justice Department to drop the charges against Assange, arguing that the public had a right to know, and that he was acting as a journalist to expose wrongdoing by the U.S. military.
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