Julian Assange entered a guilty plea to leaking American national security information, ending a 14-year legal drama that saw him spent time in prison and was forced to live in a London ambassador.
The Wikileaks chairman, who was released from a London detention on Monday, entered the appeal in a court in Saipan a few hours after arriving in the country. Under a package with national prosecutors, the 52- year- old’s second stop may be his tribal Australia.
The agreement brings an international legal battle to an end that has been ongoing since sympathetic U.S. military records, war logs, and political cables, including footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad a few years ago, were made public.
While Assange may avoid a lengthy prison sentence, Wikileaks is raising money on his behalf to protect what it claims is an extra “half a million U.S. money” he must give despite the plea bargain giving him credit for the five years he spent in a high-security English jail as he fought repatriation to the US.
Assange was accused of assisting Army intelligence researcher Chelsea Manning in obtaining around 750, 000 classified or sensitive records in one of the largest intrusions of state secrets in U.S. story. In 2013, Manning was found guilty of leaking classified information, but then-President Obama commuted her 35-year jail term in 2017.
Assange and Manning unjustly conspired” to get and receive documents, writings, and notes connected with the national protection, including for materials classified up to the SECRET level”, according to a four- page filing by the Justice Department.
Assange gained acclaim from around the world as a result of the spills and an unrelated Scandinavian murder investigation that triggered his decades on the run. Benedict Cumberbatch often portrayed him as a dark and mysterious figure in a 2013 movie about the beginnings of Wikileaks.
Under the Trump presidency, the United States illegally charged Assange with breaking the Espionage Act and requested his extradition from the United Kingdom, where he has been imprisoned ever since. If found guilty of all charges, he could receive a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison, although national crimes usually have shorter sentences than that. 17 of the initial charges involved spying and one related to computer misuse.
But the U. S. charges came decades after the Finnish investigation, which led to his being detained in 2010 in London. Assange claimed that the Finnish case was motivated by politics, and that he fought extradition while awaiting bail and escaped to the London-based Ecuadorian official.
Although those charges were dropped in 2017, Assange remained in a small room inside the embassy as he continued to evade American and British officers.
Ecuador’s decision to grant him home in 2019 led to his extraordinary arrest in April of that year. Before the recent deal was struck, he was imprisoned in London’s Belmarsh prison for five more years of legal battles as he fought the U.S. charges.
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( With assistance from Katharine Gemmell, Jennifer Jacobs and Justin Sink. )
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