WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Walks Free From UK Jail After Agreeing To Plead Guilty To US Spying Charges

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has reached a plea deal to resolve his alleged involvement in a government data breach. The agreement, as per federal court documents, will allow him to evade imprisonment. Under the terms of the deal, Assange will admit to one count of conspiring to acquire and disclose information related to national defense in a U.S. federal court in Saipan, part of the Northern Mariana Islands. The plea is anticipated to take place this week. Previously, Assange spent five years in a British prison while resisting extradition to the United States. A sentencing hearing for Assange is scheduled on Saipan this Wednesday. Pending judicial approval, he is expected to receive credit for his previous five-year confinement and not face additional jail time.

WikiLeaks said on X that Assange had left Belmarsh prison on Monday morning, after 1,901 days of captivity there. He had spent the time, the organisation said, “in a 2×3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day”.

Assange was set to be reunited with his wife Stella, who confirmed on X that “Julian is free!”. She thanked Assange’s supporters, saying “Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU- yes YOU, who have all mobilised for years and years to make this come true”.

According to a report in The Guardian, WikiLeaks in 2010 released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history – along with swaths of diplomatic cables.

The plea agreement comes months after President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia to drop the US push to prosecute Assange.

Assange was indicted during former President Donald Trump’s administration over WikiLeaks’ mass release of secret US documents, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

The trove of more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts such as a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff.