WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has pleaded guilty to a felony for publishing U.S. military secrets and struck a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice that is expected to secure his freedom and end an extraordinary legal saga.
The plea was filed Wednesday morning in the federal court on Saipan, capital of the U.S. Pacific Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Assange flew from London to Saipan and arrived at the court shortly before the hearing began, wearing a dark suit and loose tie.
Assange was accompanied by Australian Ambassador to the United States Kevin Rudd and Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Stephen Smith. He was welcomed by a large crowd of foreign and local media, but despite shouts at him including whether he preferred the weather in Saipan to London, he did not stop to address the assembled media.
The hearing was the culmination of a years-long witch hunt by the U.S. government against publishers, who have been portrayed both as heroes of press freedom and as reckless criminals for exposing hundreds of thousands of sensitive military documents.
In a wood-panelled courthouse at the foot of a lush hillside on Saipan’s coast, Assange told the court he pleaded guilty to one of the charges against him. Asked by the judge to explain “what you did,” Assange said, “As a journalist, I encourage my sources to provide information that is said to be confidential so that it can be published.”
Assange said he believed the espionage he was accused of violated U.S. First Amendment rights, but acknowledged it was a violation and “it would be difficult to win a case like this, all circumstances considered.”
In response, U.S. government lawyer Matthew McKenzie read out details of the types of classified documents Manning obtained and released by WikiLeaks. McKenzie, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Justice’s counterintelligence division, said Assange’s views on the First Amendment and the Espionage Act were inconsistent with the facts.
“We reject those views but acknowledge that he believed them,” McKenzie said.
Under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, Assange will be free to leave the court and reunite with his family in Australia, having already served his sentence in a British prison.
The Justice Department agreed to hold the hearing on the remote island because of Assange’s objections to traveling to the U.S. mainland and the island’s proximity to Australia, where he will return after pleading guilty.
The deal, revealed in court documents on Monday, represents the final chapter in a more than decade-long legal battle over the fate of Assange, considered a hero by many around the world for exposing U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq. and Afghanistan, while others, including multiple U.S. governments, said he put lives at risk by leaking secret documents.
Before being held in London, Assange spent several years hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face charges of rape and sexual assault, which he denied and were later dropped by Swedish authorities.
The abrupt conclusion allows both sides to claim a level of success, with the Justice Department able to resolve a case that raised thorny legal questions without a trial and that, given the slow pace of the extradition process, may never be Will reach the jury.
His wife, Stella Assange, told the BBC in Australia it had been 72 hours since the deal would go ahead but she was “delighted” with the news. She, a lawyer who married the WikiLeaks founder in prison in 2022, said details of the agreement would be made public once a judge signs off on it.
“Once the judge signs it, he will be a free man,” she said, adding that she still didn’t think that was true.
Assange left Belmarsh Prison on Monday, where he has spent the past five years, after being granted bail at a secret hearing last week. He boarded a plane and landed in Bangkok a few hours later to refuel before flying again to Saipan. A video posted by WikiLeaks on X shows Assange staring intently out the window at the blue sky as the plane flew to the island.
“Imagine. More than five years in a small cell in a high-security prison. Almost 14 years in detention in the UK.” wrote WikiLeaks. Australia’s top diplomat in the UK accompanied Assange on the plane.
AP and Reuters
