The paper states that Julian Assange, who is being held in British custody, will enter a guilty plea to a single charge of conspiring to obtain and distribute information related to national defense.
Washington: According to court documents made public on Monday night, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has consented to enter a guilty plea in US court to disclosing military secrets in exchange for his release, putting an end to his protracted legal battle.
Assange, who had been detained in Britain, will enter a guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to obtain and distribute material related to national security, according to a document submitted to a court in the US territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, which is in the Pacific.
Early on Tuesday morning British time, WikiLeaks announced that “Julian Assange is free” and had left the nation. In the US territory, his appearance is slated for Wednesday AM local time.
With credit for the five years he has already spent behind bars in Britain, Assange is anticipated to receive a sentence of 62 months in prison. That implies he might go back to his home country of Australia.
As the head of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, the 52-year-old publisher was sought by Washington for disclosing hundreds of thousands of classified US papers from 2010.
Throughout his journey, Assange rose to fame among proponents of free speech worldwide and became a villain among others who believed that by disclosing secrets, he had jeopardized US national security and intelligence sources.
The US government intended to prosecute Assange for disclosing US military intelligence regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Presumably, this plea deal will put an end to Assange’s nearly 14-year legal ordeal.
A US federal grand jury indicted Julian Assange in 2019 on eighteen counts related to the release of a vast cache of national security information by WikiLeaks.
The agreement was revealed two weeks prior to Assange’s scheduled court appearance in Britain to contest a decision that authorized his extradition to the United States.
Since April 2019, Assange has been held at London’s high-security Belmarsh jail.
After hiding out at Ecuador’s London embassy for seven years in order to evade extradition to Sweden, where he was accused of sexual assault but the charges were later dropped, he was apprehended.
Among the materials he made public was footage from a 2007 US helicopter gunship in Iraq that showed civilians being killed by gunfire. Two journalists from Reuters were among the victims.
Assange has been charged by the US under the 1917 Espionage Act. His supporters have cautioned that this could result in a 175-year prison sentence for him.
In June 2022, the British government gave its approval for his extradition.
In May, two British courts announced that he might file an appeal against being extradited to the United States, adding even another twist to the tale.
The appeal was intended to answer the question of whether he would be entitled to the First Amendment’s protections of free expression as a foreign defendant in an American court.
The plea agreement was not wholly surprising. There has been mounting pressure on President Joe Biden to abandon the protracted legal action against Assange.
Supporters of Assange began to believe that his ordeal may come to an end when the Australian government submitted a formal request in February, and Biden responded by saying he would take it into consideration.
