WASHINGTON — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was released from a British prison on Tuesday and is heading to a remote Pacific island where he plans to plead guilty to conspiracy charges as part of a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice, court documents said.
The agreement frees Assange and ends a years-long legal battle over the release of troves of secret documents.
Assange was charged with conspiring to obtain and disclose national defense information in a criminal complaint that typically represents a plea bargain, according to court documents.
WikiLeaks posted the footage to X at 5pm on Monday (12pm ET) showing Assange boarding a plane at Stansted Airport near London.
Assange is scheduled to appear in court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory north of Guam, at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday (7 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday) to plead guilty, according to a letter from Justice Department official Matthew McKenzie.
A plane believed to be carrying Assange landed in the Thai capital Bangkok early on Tuesday to refuel before he arrives to attend what is likely his final court hearing after spending five years in a British prison.
The islands are 3,400 miles north of Australia, where Assange is a national, and the Department of Justice expects he will return to Australia after the trial.
“This case has dragged on and there is nothing to be gained by continuing to detain him. We want him to return to Australia,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.
“I am grateful that my son’s ordeal has finally come to an end. This shows the importance and power of quiet diplomacy,” Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, said in a statement widely reported by Australian media.
His wife, Stella Assange, who is currently waiting for her husband in Australia with their two children, aged five and seven, told BBC Radio 4. “Once the judge signs it, he’s free,” she said, adding that it would not be known until the final 24 hours whether a deal would be reached.
“I was very happy,” she said.
Lawyer Stella Assange also told Reuters she would seek a pardon on her husband’s behalf. She said his guilty plea to espionage charges raised “very serious concerns” among journalists around the world.
The US charges against Assange stem from the largest secret disclosure in American history, which took place during President Barack Obama’s first term in office.
According to the government, beginning in late 2009, Assange conspired with military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to use his WikiLeaks website to expose tens of thousands of operational reports on the Afghanistan war, hundreds of thousands of reports on the Iraq war, hundreds of thousands of State Department cables, and assessment reports of detainees at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Court documents revealing Assange’s plea deal were filed Monday night in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, where he is expected to appear and receive a 62-month sentence, minus any time served in a British prison, which would free him to return to his native Australia.
“This was an independent decision made by the Department of Justice and the White House had no role in deciding on a plea agreement,” National Security Council spokesman Adrienne Watson said in a statement Monday night.
Assange has been in the maximum security Belmarsh prison in east London for five years, having previously spent seven years in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he reportedly fathered two children, before his asylum application was cancelled and he was forcibly removed from the embassy and arrested in April 2019.
A superseding indictment was filed more than five years ago, in May 2019, and a second indictment was filed in June 2020.
Assange has fought extradition for more than a decade, first in connection with a sex crimes case in Sweden (which was eventually dropped), and then in connection with the proceedings against him in the United States.
In March, the London High Court allowed a full hearing on Assange’s appeal, as he sought assurances that he could rely on the First Amendment in his US trial. In May, two High Court judges said a full hearing could be held on whether Assange was discriminated against in the US because he is a foreign national. A hearing on Assange’s free speech rights was scheduled for July 9 and 10.
WikiLeaks also released hacked Democratic National Committee emails that upended the 2016 presidential election. Russian operatives were subsequently indicted in connection with the hacking in 2018 as part of then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s case.
Days later, at a joint press conference with then-President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump denied the indictment and the intelligence reports, and said Putin “very strongly denies” the allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him win.
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison, but President Obama commuted her sentence on the final day of his presidency in 2017. Manning was then held in contempt of court for nearly a year for refusing to answer questions from a grand jury, but was later released after attempting suicide.
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