Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is poised to plead guilty on Wednesday to violating one count of US espionage law, in a deal that would release him after a 14-year, British legal odyssey and allow him to return to Australia, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
Assange, 52, has agreed to plead guilty to one felony count of conspiring to obtain and distribute sensitive US national defense materials, according to the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific Ocean.
The agreement brings an end to a legal drama in which Assange spent more than five years in a British high-security jail and seven years before that holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London while he fought off accusations of sex crimes in Sweden and contested extradition to the United States, where he faced 18 criminal counts.
The US government sees him as a reckless criminal who has put agents’ lives in peril through the release by WikiLeaks of classified US secrets, deemed to be the worst security breach in US military history.
To free press activists and his fans, who include international leaders, celebrities, and some notable journalists, he is a hero for exposing wrongdoing and suspected war crimes, who was prosecuted for essentially “humiliating US officials.”
Under the plea agreement, Assange is scheduled to be sentenced to 62 months prison minus time already served at the US District Court court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, on Wednesday at 9 a.m. local time.
Prosecutors stated that the U.S. island in the Pacific was chosen because Assange had refused to fly to mainland United States and because it is close to Australia where he will eventually go.
Assange, who was born in Australia, left Belmarsh maximum security jail in the UK early on Monday before being granted release by the London High Court and subsequently boarding an aircraft, according to his wife and lawyer, Stella Assange. He was on a layover in Bangkok, according to Ms. Assange.
Wikileaks released a video of Assange signing a paper before boarding a private plane. Following the hearing in Saipan, Assange will fly to Canberra, where he is expected to arrive on Wednesday, his wife added.
Assange had just received permission to appeal approval of his extradition to the United States, and the matter was set to be heard at London’s High Court next month, a factor which helped galvanize plea negotiations.
Wikileaks sprang to fame in 2010 after releasing hundreds of thousands of classified US military papers associated with the US’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a large number of diplomatic cables.
The collection of over 700,000 papers contained war stories, such as a 2007 film of a US Apache helicopter shooting on suspected rebels in Iraq, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists. The video was released in 2010.
The allegations against Assange provoked indignation among his many global supporters, who have long contended that as Wikileaks’ publisher, he should not face penalties similar to those used against federal government officials who steal or leak material.
Assange was originally arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish officials stated that they intended to interview him about sex crime charges, which were later dropped.
He escaped to Ecuador’s embassy, where he resided for seven years, avoiding extradition to Sweden.
He and his lawyer wife Stella had two children while he was there. He was hauled from the embassy in 2019 when Ecuador revoked his refugee status.
Imprisoned for having failed to post bail, he has been in Belmarsh ever since, most recently opposing extradition to the United States.
There are “millions of people who have been advocating for Julian, [and] it is almost time for them to have a drink and a celebration,” his brother Gabriel Shipton told Reuters from France.