WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the U.S. made a deal to end his decade-long legal odyssey and allow him to return home to Australia this week. Assange, whose website disclosed U.S. secrets about the war in Iraq and embarrassing emails about the Democratic Party during the 2016 election, is pleading guilty to a felony charge of conspiring to disseminate classified information. He will be sentenced to just over five years in prison — but would be released because that’s how long he’s been jailed in England while fighting extradition to the U.S., reports Politico. The case has been a headache for the Biden administration, which has faced pressure from Australia to end Assange’s years in legal limbo. Assange, 52, has been jailed in London. Assange’s guilty plea to an Espionage Act charge was set for U.S. District Court in the Northern Mariana Islands — a U.S. territory 2,000 miles north of Australia. The venue reflects Assange’s unwillingness to return to the continental U.S. The radical transparency activist harbors a deep distrust of the U.S. government.
Assange and his allies have accused U.S. officials of plotting to have him killed with a drone. The saga dates to 2010, when Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked a vast trove of data to WikiLeaks including videos of deadly U.S. military airstrikes, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and logs of U.S. military activity in Afghanistan and Iraq. Assange appears to have been under criminal investigation in the U.S. since the 2010 leaks, but the first charges against him did not come until December 2017, in a complaint filed in the federal court in Alexandria, Va., It did not charge Assange with violating the Espionage Act, but with a pair of federal felonies most often charged in computer hacking or fraud cases. Prosecutors obtained an indictment of Assange in 2018 on the computer charge. In 2019, a grand jury indictment was returned against him on 18 felony charges, including for allegedly agreeing to aid Manning in cracking a password needed to access a secret U.S. government computer network.
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