'Julian Assange Is Free': WikiLeaks Founder Walks Out Of Jail After US Plea Deal On Espionage Charge

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is set to plead guilty this week to violating US espionage law in a deal that ended his imprisonment in Britain and allowed him to return home to Australia.

The 52-year-old, accused of divulging American military secrets related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents.

Assange is due to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served at a hearing on the island of Saipan at 9 am local time on Wednesday. He 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 organisers, 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. He will return to Australia after the hearing, the Wikileaks statement added, referring to the hearing in Saipan.

Julian Assange boards flight at London Stansted Airport at 5PM (BST) Monday June 24th. This is for everyone who worked for his freedom: thank you.#FreedJulianAssange pic.twitter.com/Pqp5pBAhSQ

More about Assange

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 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.

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. An Australian government spokesperson said: “Prime Minister (Anthony) Albanese has been clear – Mr Assange’s case has dragged on for too long and there is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration.”

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 US.

(With agency inputs)