Assange set for freedom after pleading guilty to US espionage charge

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty to violating U.S. espionage law, in a deal that will end his imprisonment in Britain and allow him to return home to Australia, ending a 14-year legal odyssey.

Assange, 52, has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. national defense documents, according to filings in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.

The deal marks the end of a legal saga in which Assange spent years in a British high-security jail and in the Ecuadorean embassy in London and fought allegations of sex crimes in Sweden, while battling extradition to the U.S., where he faced 18 criminal charges.

Viewed as a villain by the U.S. government for potentially putting classified government sources at risk, he has been hailed as a hero by free press advocates for exposing wrongdoing and alleged war crimes.

On Wednesday, he is due to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served at a hearing in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, at 9 a.m. local time (2300 GMT Tuesday). The U.S. territory in the Pacific was chosen due to Assange's opposition to traveling to the mainland U.S. and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.

Assange left Belmarsh prison in the UK on Monday before being bailed by the UK High Court and boarding a flight that afternoon, Wikileaks said in a statement posted on social media platform X.

"This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organizers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations," the statement said.

A video posted on X by Wikileaks showed Assange dressed in a blue shirt and jeans signing a document before boarding a private jet with the markings of charter firm VistaJet.

The only VistaJet plane that left Stansted on Monday afternoon landed in Bangkok on Tuesday afternoon, en-route to Saipan, according to FlightRadar24 data.

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Australian return

Assange will return to Australia after the hearing, the Wikileaks statement said.

The Australian government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has been pressing for Assange's release but declined to comment on the legal proceedings as they were ongoing.

WikiLeaks in 2010 released hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - the largest security breaches of their kind in U.S. military history - along with swaths of diplomatic cables.

Assange was indicted during former President Donald Trump's administration over WikiLeaks' mass release of secret U.S. documents, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. 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 U.S. Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.

The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many global supporters who have long argued that Assange as the publisher of Wikileaks should not face charges typically used against federal government employees who steal or leak information.

Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange represents a threat to free speech.

'Elated'

Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex-crime allegations that were later dropped. He fled to Ecuador's embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.

He was dragged out of the embassy in 2019 and jailed for skipping bail. He has been in London's Belmarsh top security jail ever since, from where he has for almost five years been fighting extradition to the United States.

Assange's wife Stella said on Tuesday she was "elated" and it was "incredible" her husband was set to be freed following a 14-year legal battle.

"I'm just elated," she told BBC Radio. "He will be a free man once it has been signed off by the judge and that will happen sometime tomorrow." 

Assange is expected to head to Sydney, Australia after he appears in a courtroom on Saipan.

Stella Assange said she had flown to Australia on Sunday with the pair's two children, aged 7 and 5, and had told them there was a "big surprise" coming but that she hadn't been certain of what would happen until the last minute.

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