AP (“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty in deal with US and be freed from prison“):
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty to a felony charge in a deal with the U.S. Justice Department that will allow him to walk free and resolve a long-running legal saga that spanned multiple continents and centered on the publication of a trove of classified documents.
Assange left a British prison on Monday and will appear later this week in the U.S. federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific. He’s expected to plead guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information, the Justice Department said in a letter filed in court.
The guilty plea, which must be approved by a judge, brings an abrupt conclusion to a criminal case of international intrigue and to the U.S. government’s years-long pursuit of a publisher whose hugely popular secret-sharing website made him a cause célèbre among many press freedom advocates who said he acted as a journalist to expose U.S. military wrongdoing. Investigators, by contrast, have repeatedly asserted that his actions broke laws meant to protect sensitive information and put the country’s national security at risk.
He is expected to return to his home country of Australia after his plea and sentencing, which is scheduled for Wednesday morning, local time in Saipan, the largest island in the Northern Mariana Islands. The hearing is taking place there because of Assange’s opposition to traveling to the continental U.S. and the court’s proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.
[…]
Assange is expected to be sentenced to the five years he has already spent in the high-security British prison while fighting to avoid extradition to the U.S. to face charges, a process that has played out in a series of hearings in London. Last month, he won the right to appeal an extradition order after his lawyers argued that the U.S. government provided “blatantly inadequate” assurances that he would have the same free speech protections as an American citizen if extradited from Britain.
[…]
The plea agreement comes months after President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia to drop the U.S. push to prosecute Assange. The White House was not involved in the decision to resolve Assange’s case, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
NPR (“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange strikes plea deal with the U.S.“) adds:
A federal grand jury in Virginia indicted Assange on espionage and computer misuse charges in 2019, in what the Justice Department described as one of the largest compromises of classified information in American history.
The indictment accused Assange of conspiring with then-military Private Chelsea Manning to obtain and then publish secret reports about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables. Prosecutors said Assange published those materials on his site WikiLeaks without properly scrubbing them of sensitive information, putting informants and others at grave risk of harm.
“No responsible actor, journalist or otherwise, would purposefully publish the names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential human sources in a war zone, exposing them to the gravest of dangers,” said former Assistant Attorney General John Demers at the time of that indictment.
Manning was arrested in 2010 and served seven years in prison before President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Assange’s case attracted support from human rights and journalism groups including Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists, fearing the Espionage Act case against Assange could create precedent for charging journalists with national security crimes.
NYT (“Assange Agrees to Plead Guilty in Exchange for Release, Ending Standoff With U.S.“) adds:
His release was not unexpected. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia suggested that U.S. prosecutors needed to conclude the case, and President Biden signaled that he was open to a rapid resolution. Top officials at the Justice Department accepted an agreement with no additional prison time because Mr. Assange had already served longer than most people charged with a similar offense — in this case, over five years in prison in Britain.
[…]
Mr. Assange and his supporters have long argued that his efforts to obtain and publicly release sensitive national security information was in the public interest, and deserved the same First Amendment protections afforded to investigative journalists.
Many of Mr. Assange’s supporters renewed those concerns even as they expressed relief that he would be released.
“The United States has now, for the first time in the more than 100-year history of the Espionage Act, obtained an Espionage Act conviction for basic journalistic acts,” said David Greene, director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Civil Liberties, a nonprofit focused on First Amendment issues.
“These charges should never have been brought,” he said.
In 2021, a coalition of civil-liberties and human-rights groups urged the Biden administration to drop its efforts to extradite him from Britain and prosecute him, calling the case “a grave threat” to press freedom.
Much of the conduct he is accused of is what “journalists engage in routinely,” the group contended. “News organizations frequently and necessarily publish classified information in order to inform the public of matters of profound public significance.”
But U.S. officials argued that Mr. Assange’s actions went far beyond news gathering, putting at risk national security. The material furnished by Ms. Manning, prosecutors claimed, endangered the lives of service members and Iraqis who worked with the military, and made it harder for the country to counter external threats.
An unsatisfying but fitting ending to a saga that has dragged on over 14 years. While I’ve never bought the idea that Assange was a “journalist,” he had no duty to safeguard US national security. Those who did, including the then-Bradley Manning, have long since been freed. (Or, in the case of Edward Snowden, fled to Russia.) And the actual US journalists who abetted Assange were—quite rightly since they did not abet the theft—never charged.
