WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Set to Be Freed after Pleading Guilty to US Espionage Charge

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is due to plead guilty on Wednesday to violating US 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 US national defense documents, according to filings in the US 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 US, where he faced 18 criminal charges, Reuters said.
Viewed as a villain by the US 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 US territory in the Pacific was chosen due to Assange's opposition to traveling to the mainland US 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.
Assange will return to Australia after the hearing, the Wikileaks statement said.
"Julian is free!!!!" his wife, Stella Assange, said in a post on X.
"Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU - yes YOU, who have all mobilized for years and years to make this come true."
A spokesperson for Assange in Australia declined to comment on his flight plans. VistaJet did not respond to a request for comment.
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.
"Regardless of the views that people have about Mr. Assange (and) his activities, the case has dragged on for too long," Albanese said in the country's parliament.
"There is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia."
A lawyer for Assange did not respond to a request for comment.
HISTORIC CHARGES
WikiLeaks in 2010 released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - the largest security breaches of their kind in US 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 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.
"While we welcome the end of his detention, the US’s pursuit of Assange has set a harmful legal precedent by opening the way for journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they receive classified material from whistleblowers," said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
LONG ODYSSEY
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.
Those five years of confinement are similar to the sentence imposed on Reality Winner, an Air Force veteran and former intelligence contractor, who was sentenced to 63 months after she removed classified materials and mailed them to a news outlet.
Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years, but President Barack Obama reduced the term to seven years, saying her sentence was disproportionate to those received by other leakers.
While in Belmarsh Assange married his partner Stella with whom he had two children while he was stuck in the Ecuadorean embassy.

Georgia's president called for protests on Monday following a disputed parliamentary election, and the United States and the European Union urged a full investigation into reports of violations in the voting.
The results, with almost all precincts counted, were a blow for pro-Western Georgians who had cast Saturday's election as a choice between a ruling party that has deepened ties with Russia and an opposition aiming to fast-track integration with Europe, said Reuters.
Monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said on Sunday they had registered incidents of vote-buying, voter intimidation, and ballot-stuffing that could have affected the outcome, but they stopped short of saying the election was rigged.
President Salome Zourabichvili urged people to take to the streets to protest against the results of the ballot, which the electoral commission said the ruling party had won.
In an address on Sunday, she referred to the result as a "Russian special operation". She did not clarify what she meant by the term.
The ruling Georgian Dream party, of which Zourabichvili is a fierce critic, clinched nearly 54% of the vote, the commission said, as opposition parties contested the outcome and vote monitors reported significant violations.
Georgian media cited Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze as saying on Monday that the opposition was attempting to topple the "constitutional order" and that his government remained committed to European integration.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States joined calls from observers for a full probe.
"Going forward, we encourage Georgia's political leaders to respect the rule of law, repeal legislation that undermines fundamental freedoms, and address deficiencies in the electoral process together," Blinken said in a statement.
Earlier, the European Union urged Georgia to swiftly and transparently investigate the alleged irregularities in the vote.
"The EU recalls that any legislation that undermines the fundamental rights and freedoms of Georgian citizens and runs counter to the values and principles upon which the EU is founded, must be repealed," the European Commission said in a joint statement with EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.
President Zourabichvili, a former Georgian Dream ally who won the 2018 presidential vote as an independent, urged Georgians to protest in the center of the capital Tbilisi on Monday evening, to show the world "that we do not recognize these elections".
For years, Georgia was one of the most pro-Western countries to emerge from the Soviet Union, with polls showing many Georgians disliking Russia for its support of two breakaway regions of their country.
Russia defeated Georgia in their brief war over the rebel province of South Ossetia in 2008.
The election result poses a challenge to the EU's ambition to expand by bringing in more former Soviet states.
Moldova earlier this month narrowly approved adding a clause to the constitution defining EU accession as a goal. Moldovan officials said Russia meddled in the election, a claim denied by Moscow.

WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Set to Be Freed after Pleading Guilty to US Espionage Charge