Julian Assange signs plea deal and is released from prison

(Patria) - Julian Assange has been released from prison! US authorities have agreed to drop extradition requests for Assange from Great Britain after reaching a plea deal with the founder of "Wikileaks".

In exchange for pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, Assange will be sentenced to time served - 62 months, the amount of time he has already spent in a British prison, according to court documents.

Once a judge accepts the plea, Assange will be able to return to Australia, his country of birth.

In a post on the X platform, Wikileaks stated that Assange left Belmarsh on Monday morning after the High Court granted him bail. By the afternoon, he was at Stansted Airport, where he boarded a plane and left Great Britain.

- After more than five years in a 2x3 meter cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon be reunited with his wife Stella Assange and their children, who know their father only from behind bars - the company stated.

A federal judge in the Northern Mariana Islands has scheduled a hearing for the plea and sentencing for Wednesday morning, the US District Court there announced.

Justice Department prosecutors asked the court to hold the proceedings on the same day, as Assange refused to set foot in the continental US for the plea, according to a letter from the prosecutors.

The court on the islands is located near Australia, where Assange is a citizen and where he is expected to return after the hearing, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors told the judge that "they expect the defendant to plead guilty to the charge... and that the court will sentence him for this offense".

JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE

Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a…

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 24, 2024

In 2010, WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of confidential US military documents about Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history, along with a series of diplomatic cables.

Assange was indicted during the administration of President Donald Trump for the mass publication of secret US documents, provided by Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

More than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield reports, such as a 2007 video showing a US Apache helicopter firing on suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing about a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists. The video was released in 2010.

The charges against Assange have drawn outrage from his many supporters around the world who claim that Assange, as the publisher of Wikileaks, should not face charges typically used against federal government officials who steal or leak information. Many press freedom advocates have argued that the prosecution of Assange represents a threat to freedom of speech.

Assange was first arrested in the UK in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over allegations of sexual offenses, which were later dropped. He fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.

He was removed from the embassy in 2019 and jailed for skipping bail. Since then, he has been in London's Belmarsh prison, from where he has been fighting extradition to the United States for almost five years. In prison, he married his partner Stella, with whom he had two children while hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy.