WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pleads guilty in deal with US that secures his freedom, ends legal fight
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has pleaded guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that secures his liberty and concludes a drawn-out legal saga that raised divisive questions about press freedom and national security.
The plea was entered Wednesday morning in federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, an American commonwealth in the Pacific that is relatively close to Assange's native Australia and that accommodated his desire to avoid setting foot inside the continental United States.
The deal required the iconoclastic internet publisher to admit guilt to a single felony count but also permitted him to return to Australia without any time in an American prison. He had been jailed in the United Kingdom since 2019, fighting extradition to the United States on an Espionage Act indictment that could have carried a lengthy prison sentence in the event of a conviction, and for seven years before that was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
The conclusion enables both sides to claim a degree of satisfaction. The Justice Department, facing a defendant who had already served substantial jail time, was able to resolve — without trial — a case that raised thorny legal issues and that might never have reached a jury at all given the plodding pace of the extradition process. Assange, for his part, signaled a begrudging contentment with the resolution, saying in
