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WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has been from prison in the UK and will be allowed to return to his home country of Australia after he pleads guilty to illegally disseminating national security material in the U.S., according to a surprising new report from NBC News.
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Court documents filed Monday by the U.S. federal government in the Northern Mariana Islands suggest the plea deal is imminent, though the New York Times notes everything still needs to be approved by a judge. Assange previously faced 170 years in prison.
Why have the court documents been filed in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific? According to the Associated Press, it’s due to Assange’s “opposition to traveling to the continental U.S. and the court’s proximity to Australia.”
The 52-year-old has been held in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison for the past five years, a period that follows a years-long saga that saw Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy while claiming asylum in 2012. Assange was physically dragged out of the embassy by British authorities in April 2019.
“Julian Assange is free,” the WikiLeaks X account tweeted on Monday around 8:00 p.m. ET. “He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.”
WikiLeaks also published a video of Assange, embedded below, showing him reading paperwork and appearing to board a plane, presumably bound for the Northern Mariana Islands to formally enter his plea.
The Times explains that a plea deal was deemed acceptable to top officials at the Justice Department because Assange had already served five years in the UK while awaiting extradition to the U.S.
The original charges against Assange were brought by the U.S. Department of Justice under President Donald Trump in 2019, despite the fact that Trump would often talk about how much he loved WikiLeaks. Trump failed to pardon Assange before leaving office, something many Assange backers insisted the former president would do.
Assange faced 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act along with charges related to criminal hacking, but the Times reports he’ll only plead guilty to one charge. Assange allegedly provided instructions to whistleblower Chelsea Manning on how to access classified computers, which is what experts claimed was the differentiating factor that made his conduct more serious than a typical journalist who simply disseminates sensitive information.
The plea deal would put an end to the incredibly long saga that has engulfed Assange for over a decade now, though it’s not clear whether the WikiLeaks founder would immediately get back to work.
The Australian government made repeated pleas to the White House for Assange’s release, though it was never clear whether President Joe Biden was going to intervene in the case. Assange has reportedly suffered various health issues in prison, though the short video clip released by WikiLeaks appears to show Assange is visibly healthy.
