WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange attends court, pleads guilty to espionage charge

SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pleaded guilty on Wednesday to a felony charge of violating the Espionage Act, a move that will allow him to go free after he spent five years in a British prison.

Assange, 52, pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiring to obtain and distribute classified information after his organization obtained and published classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010, The Washington Post reported.

Assange lands in Australia

Update 7 a.m. EDT June 26: Julian Assange has landed in his native Australia. Assange’s plane touched down in the Australian capital of Canberra at 7:37 p.m. (5:37 a.m. EDT), data from flight-tracking platform Flightradar24 showed.

Assange sentenced to time already served

Update 10:07 p.m. EDT June 25: Julian Assange was sentenced to time already served in the United Kingdom as part of a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department that will secure his freedom, The Associated Press reported.

Assange served for 62 months in the high-security Belmarsh Prison on the outskirts of London.

Assange later boarded a plane to travel home to his native country of Australia.

Original report: The plea was entered Wednesday morning in U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands that is a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific, according to The Associated Press.

Assange told Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona that he had waived his right to indictment by a grand jury, the Post reported.

“Not every case goes this fast,” Manglona joked.

Assange said he was in Stanstead Airport in the United Kingdom when he signed the plea agreement on Monday, according to the newspaper. He confirmed that he was not coerced to sign the agreement.

Assange would face as many as 10 years imprisonment but no minimum prison sentence, and a fine of up to $250,000, the Post reported. Because of his plea agreement with federal prosecutors, he will avoid more prison time.

As a condition of his plea, Assange will be required to destroy information that was provided to WikiLeaks, according to the AP.

He admitted that he broke U.S. law by encouraging classified leaks, but added that the law violated his rights to free speech, the news organization reported.

Assange was indicted by a federal jury in 2019 on 18 counts related to WikiLeaks’ release and distribution of national security documents, according to The New York Times. They included materials sent to the organization in 2010 and 2013 by former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, the newspaper reported.

U.S. officials alleged that Assange persuaded Manning into obtaining thousands of pages of diplomatic cables that potentially endangered confidential sources, according to CNN. The revelations of activity reports and information related to detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba also put national security at risk, officials said.

WikiLeaks released more than 90,000 documents related to Afghanistan and more than 400,000 documents from the war in Iraq, according to USA Today.

Assange has been held in the high-security Belmarsh Prison on the outskirts of London for five years, NBC News reported. Previously, he spent seven years in self-exile at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, according to the news outlet.

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