Julian Assange will plead guilty and be sentenced to a sentence he has already served. He will therefore be free.
This is the end of a long legal saga that spanned several continents. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty as part of a deal with the US Department of Justice, according to court documents filed late Monday.
Julian Assange is to appear in federal court in the Mariana Islands, located in the Western Pacific near Australia, to plead guilty to conspiring to illegally obtain and disseminate classified information relating to national defense, according to to the Espionage Act.
The agreement ensures that Mr. Assange will admit his guilt while avoiding additional prison time. Prosecutors agreed on a sentence corresponding to the five years Mr. Assange has already spent in a high-security British prison.
Last month, he won the right to appeal an extradition order after his lawyers argued that the U.S. government was failing to provide guarantees that he would receive the same free speech protections as a US citizen if extradited from the UK.
Among the files published by WikiLeaks is the video of an Apache helicopter attack carried out in 2007 by American forces in Baghdad, which left 11 dead, including two journalists from the Reuters agency.
The Justice Department indictment unsealed in 2019 accused Mr. Assange of encouraging and assisting Chelsea Manning, a US military intelligence analyst, in stealing diplomatic and military information that WikiLeaks published in 2010. Prosecutors had accused Mr. Assange of harming national security by publishing materials that harmed the United States and its allies and helped their adversaries.
The deal comes months after US President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia for the US to drop its pursuit of Mr Assange.