Wikileaks founder Julian Assange strikes plea deal with US authorities

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is expected to plead guilty to a felony US crime as part of a deal that will see him return to his native Australia, according to court documents filed Monday evening.

Assange was released from a UK maximum security prison earlier Monday and boarded a plane to depart the country from London Stansted Airport at 5 p.m. local time (1600GMT), according to video footage posted by his organization on X.

Court documents indicate that Assange is to appear in US District Court in the Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth in the western Pacific Ocean, on Wednesday.

A letter from Matthew McKenzie, the Justice Department's deputy chief for counterintelligence, to the judge on the island of Saipan asked for a court hearing at 9 a.m. local time (0200GMT).

"We appreciate the Court accommodating these plea and sentencing proceedings on a single day at the joint request of the parties, in light of the defendant’s opposition to traveling to the continental United States to enter his guilty plea and the proximity of this federal U.S. District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of the proceedings," McKenzie wrote.

Assange is expected to plead guilty to a single count of violating the US Espionage Act, namely that he conspired to unlawfully obtain and disclose US national security information.

Assange has doggedly opposed extradition to the mainland US and spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in a bid to prevent the action. He was ejected from the diplomatic compound in 2019 and has spent the past five years in British prison as he fought an extradition order to the US.

The plea deal must be approved by a US judge before it can go into force.

Assange rose to fame in the 2010s for leaking classified US documents on to the internet, gaining him both accolades and detractors internationally as he exposed sensitive American diplomatic correspondence and military records, including video footage of a 2007 US airstrike in Baghdad that killed several people, including two Reuters journalists.