WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will be freed after reaching a plea deal with the United States Justice Department.
Assange has been imprisoned in the UK’s Belmarsh prison for the last five years after spending seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy with questionable protection of political asylum.
The publisher was facing charges under the Espionage Act for publishing the Iraq and Afghan War Logs that were given to him by whistleblower Chelsea Manning. If convicted, he faced a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison for publishing the leaked materials.
On Monday evening, NBC News reported:
Assange was charged by criminal information — which typically signifies a plea deal — with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, the court documents say. A letter from Justice Department official Matthew McKenzie to U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona of the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands said that Assange would appear in court at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday (or, 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday) to plead guilty and said that DOJ expects Assange will return to Australia, his country of citizenship, after the proceedings.
U.S. charges against Assange stem from one of the largest publications of classified information in American history, which took place during the first term of Barack Obama’s presidency. Starting in late 2009, according to the government, Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning, a military intelligence analyst, to disclose tens of thousands of activity reports about the war in Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of reports about the war in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and assessment briefs of Guantanamo Bay detainees using his WikiLeaks website.
The court documents revealing Assange’s plea deal were filed Monday night in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
The Northern Mariana Islands are a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean.
Under the deal, Assange will appear in that court to be sentenced to 62 months in prison, with credit for the time he has already served in Belmarsh. This will allow him to return to his home in Australia.
The charges he will plead guilty to fall under “Conspiracy To Obtain and Disclose National Defense Information.”