Julian Assange admits to leaking US state secrets and is freed. Next stop: Australia

Australia has used “all appropriate channels” to support a “positive outcome” in the matter, he told reporters in Canberra, noting that Australia’s ambassador to the UNITED STATESKevin Rudd accompanied Assange.

“Whatever your opinion of Mr. Assange, his case has dragged on for too long. There is nothing to be gained from his continued incarceration and we want him returned to Australia,” Albanese said.

Assange arrives at a court in Saipan, the Northern Mariana Islands, on Wednesday. Photo: AFP — Assange arrives at a court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, on Wednesday. Photo: AFP

Assange pleads guilty to leaking US national security secrets, ending a 14-year legal drama that saw him spend time in British prisons and go into voluntary exile in a London embassy.

The plea deal ends an international fight to prosecute Assange that has been ongoing since sensitive U.S. military documents, war logs and diplomatic cables were publicly leaked in 2010 and 2011, including footage of an airstrike American in Baghdad a few years earlier.

While Assange will avoid a lengthy prison sentence – the plea deal gives him credit for the five years he spent in a high-security prison in the UK while fighting extradition to the US United – WikiLeaks is raising money on its behalf to cover what it sees as additional punishment. “half a million dollars” he has to pay.

In one of the largest breaches of state secrets in U.S. history, Assange was accused of helping military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning obtain approximately 750,000 classified or sensitive documents . Manning was convicted of leaking classified documents in 2013, but then-President Barack Obama commuted her 35-year prison sentence in 2017.

Assange and Manning illegally conspired “to receive and obtain documents, writings and memoranda related to national defense, including such materials classified up to the SECRET level,” according to a four-page Justice Department filing.

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be released after US plea deal

The leaks and a Swedish investigation into an unrelated rape that sparked his years on the run brought Assange global notoriety. He was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in a 2013 film about the early days of WikiLeaks and was often criticized on Saturday Night Live as a dark and mysterious character.

The United States criminally charged Assange in 2019 under the Trump administration with violations of the Espionage Act and sought to extradite him from Britain, where he has been in prison ever since. The original charges — 17 related to espionage and one related to computer misuse — carried a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison if he was convicted on all counts, though sentences for federal crimes are typically less than that.

But the U.S. accusations came years after the Swedish investigation, which led to his 2010 arrest in London. Assange said the Swedish case was politically motivated and that after months of fighting extradition while on bail, he fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Those charges were dropped in 2017, but Assange remained in a small embassy apartment as he continued to dodge British police and American prosecutors.

Ecuador dropped his asylum status in 2019, leading to his dramatic arrest early one morning in April of that year. It marked the start of his incarceration at Belmarsh Prison in London and another five years of legal wrangling as he fought US charges before the current deal was reached.

Additional reporting from Bloomberg