Julian Assange, The Founder Of WikiLeaks, Has Been Released After A 14-Year Legal Battle
Assange pleaded guilty to a single count of attempting to illegally obtain classified information and was sentenced to time already served in exchange for being immediately released.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been released by a US court on Saipan, a Pacific island territory, after he plead guilty to a single charge of violating US espionage laws.
The plea deal allowed the 52-year-old Australian man to return home to Canberra and reunite with his family, ending a high-profile legal battle that had spanned 14 years.
The remote US federal court, on Wednesday, June 26, accepted a plea deal between Assange and the US government.
As part of the deal, Assange admitted to conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US defense documents, according to an official US document.
In 2010, WikiLeaks had published a video showing a US military helicopter attacking and killing two journalists and Iraqi civilians in 2007 in Baghdad. Later, it released over 90,000 classified Afghan war documents.
The documents portrayed a very different image of the US war in Afghanistan compared to the confident public stance taken by the US.
One month later, Sweden issued an arrest warrant for Assange for two separate allegations of sexual assault,and a UK court later ruled that Assange, who was in the UK at the time, could be extradited to Sweden to face these charges.
To avoid this, he sought and was granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
The Swedish authorities dropped their investigation into rape allegations against Assange In 2017.
However, Assange still faced an arrest warrant in the UK for skipping bail in 2012 for the sexual assault case when he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.
In 2019, Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum, allowing UK police to enter the embassy and arrest him for skipping bail..
The US then formally issued charges against Assange for espionage and requested his extradition.
The British government ordered Assange’s extradition to the US, but he appealed, with his lawyers arguing successfully against extradition on mental health and human rights grounds.
The British High Court said in February 2024 that Assange has the right to challenge his extradition to the US on the grounds that he will be treated unfairly as a non-citizen of the US.
In June 2024, Assange pleaded guilty to a single count of attempting to illegally obtain classified information and was sentenced to time already served in exchange for being immediately released.
The Justice Department decided to hold the hearing on the Northern Mariana Islands due to its proximity to Australia and Assange's reluctance to travel to the US mainland, according to Guardian.
“Julian Assange is free,” wrote WikiLeaks on X, formerly known as Twitter, adding that after serving 1,901 days in Belmarsh, he was released on Monday, June 24.
"Working as a journalist I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information," Assange told the court during the three-hour hearing.
As part of the deal, he was sentenced to 64 months, which he had already served in Belmarsh, a high-security British prison, as part of the Sweden case and while awaiting a decision on extradition.
Assange was released on Tuesday, June 25, and immediately flew back home to Canberra, Australia.
Following the proceedings, Assange's lawyer, Barry Pollack, called the case "unprecedented" and an attack on free speech.
He did, however, acknowledge that it was time for the fight to come to an end, adding that WikiLeaks would continue its work.
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