WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sentenced in plea deal | News

SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands (AP) — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been sentenced to time already served in Britain as part of a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department that guarantees his freedom .

The plea was filed Wednesday morning in federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific.

The deal resolves a criminal case involving the receipt and release of war logs and diplomatic cables detailing wrongdoing by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The sentence was imposed by U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona, ​​an appointee of President Barack Obama.

THIS IS A LAST UPDATE. AP's earlier story follows below.

SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands (AP) — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has pleaded guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that guarantees his freedom and concludes a long legal saga that has raised controversial questions about press freedom and national security.

The plea was filed Wednesday morning in a federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. Pacific Commonwealth relatively close to Assange's native Australia and which satisfied his desire to avoid setting foot in the continental United States.

The deal required the iconoclastic internet publisher to admit guilt to a single charge, but also allowed him to return to Australia without going to a US prison. He had been imprisoned in the UK since 2019, fighting extradition to the US under an Espionage Act indictment that could have led to a lengthy prison sentence if convicted , and had been locked up for seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy. in London.

The conclusion allows both parties to affirm a certain satisfaction. The Justice Department, faced with a defendant who had already served a long prison sentence, was able to resolve – without a trial – a case that raised thorny legal questions and that might never have been brought before a jury given given the tedious pace of the extradition process. Assange, for his part, was reluctantly pleased with the resolution, telling the court that while he believed the Espionage Act contradicted the First Amendment, he accepted the consequences of soliciting classified information. from sources for publication.

Assange arrived in court wearing a dark suit, with a tie loosened around his collar, after leaving Britain on a charter plane accompanied by members of his legal team and Australian officials, including the top Australian diplomat in the United Kingdom.

Inside the courthouse, he answered basic questions from U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona, ​​an appointee of former President Barack Obama, and appeared to listen intently as the terms of the deal were discussed. As a condition of his plea, he will be asked to destroy classified information provided to WikiLeaks.

The secrets-telling website, founded by Assange in 2006, said in its own statement that it was grateful to “all those who stood with us, fought for us and remained fully committed to the fight.” for his freedom.

Assange appeared upbeat and relaxed during the hearing, at times joking with the judge. While signing his plea deal, he joked about the 9-hour time difference between the United Kingdom and Saipan. At another point, when the judge asked him if he was satisfied with the terms of the plea, Assange replied: “It might depend on the outcome,” prompting some laughter in the courtroom.

“So far, so good,” the judge replied.

The plea deal, disclosed Monday evening in a sketchy letter from the Justice Department, represents the latest chapter — and likely the last — in a legal battle involving the eccentric Australian computer expert that has been celebrated by his supporters as a defender of transparency but castigated by national security hawks. who insist his conduct put lives at risk and strayed well beyond the bounds of traditional journalistic functions.

The guilty plea ends a criminal case brought by the Trump administration's Justice Department in connection with the receipt and release of hundreds of thousands of war logs and diplomatic cables detailing military wrongdoing America in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Prosecutors alleged that he teamed up with Chelsea Manning, a former military intelligence analyst, to obtain the documents, including conspiring to crack a Defense Department computer password, and that he published them without regard to American national security. The names of human sources who provided information to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were among the details revealed, prosecutors said.

But his activities drew overwhelming support from press freedom advocates, who praised his role in exposing military behavior that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Among the files released by WikiLeaks is a video of an Apache helicopter attack carried out by US forces in Baghdad in 2007, which left 11 people dead, including two Reuters journalists.

The indictment was unsealed in 2019, but Assange's legal troubles long preceded the criminal case and continued well beyond.

Weeks after the largest cache of documents was released in 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman's rape allegations and another's allegations of assault. Assange long maintained his innocence and the investigation was later abandoned.

He presented himself in 2012 at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he sought asylum on grounds of political persecution, and spent the next seven years in exile there, welcoming a parade of celebrity visitors and making periodic appearances from the building's balcony to address supporters.

In 2019, his hosts withdrew his asylum, allowing British police to arrest him. He has remained in prison for the past five years while the Justice Department sought to extradite him, in a process that faced skepticism from British judges concerned about how Assange would be treated by the American criminal justice system.

Ultimately, however, the resolution sparing Assange a U.S. prison sentence contradicts years of ominous warnings from Assange and his supporters that the U.S. criminal justice system would expose him to unduly harsh treatment , potentially including the death penalty – something prosecutors never asked for.

Last month, Assange won the right to appeal an extradition decision after his lawyers argued that the US government had provided “grossly insufficient” assurances that he would receive the same freedom of speech protections. expression as an American citizen if extradited from Great Britain.

His wife, Stella Assange, told the BBC from Australia that it took 72 hours for the deal to be finalized, but that she felt “delighted” with the news. A lawyer who married the WikiLeaks founder in prison in 2022, she said details of the agreement would be made public once the judge signed it.

“He will be a free man once the trial is approved by a judge,” she said, adding that she still doesn’t think it’s real.

Assange left London prison, where he has spent the past five years, on Monday after being released on bail at a secret hearing last week. He boarded a plane that landed a few hours later in Bangkok to refuel before heading back to Saipan. A video released by WikiLeaks on X showed Assange staring intently out the window at the blue sky as the plane headed toward the island.

“Imagine. For more than 5 years in a small cell of a maximum security prison. Almost 14 years of detention in the United Kingdom For this, ”WikiLeaks wrote.

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Tucker reported from Fort Pierce, Fla., and Durkin Richer from Washington. Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Washington, Napat Kongsawad and David Rising in Bangkok, Jill Lawless and Brian Melley in London and Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, contributed to this report.

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