Julian Assange was freed from a London prison on Monday after more than five years and will not be extradited to the United States after agreeing to a plea deal with authorities.
The WikiLeaks founder agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose U.S. national defense information, Reuters reported on June 24, citing prosecutors' filings in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
In return, he is likely to be sentenced to five years and three months time served, which he has spent in London’s Belmarsh Prison since being jailed there in April 2019.
His sentencing hearing is set for June 25 at 11:00 pm UTC, which is Wednesday at 9:00 am Chamorro Standard Time on the island of Saipan.
WikiLeaks wrote in a June 24 X post that the court had granted Assange bail and that he boarded a flight leaving the United Kingdom on Monday to eventually return to his native Australia.
Julian Assange boards flight at London Stansted Airport at 5PM (BST) Monday June 24th. This is for everyone who worked for his freedom: thank you.#FreedJulianAssange pic.twitter.com/Pqp5pBAhSQ
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 25, 2024
In 2010, WikiLeaks published over 700,000 classified U.S. documents and diplomatic cables on its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq leaked by former military intel analyst Chelsea Manning.
In December 2010, PayPal cut off WikiLeaks’ account, which it used to raise funds, and the publisher turned to Bitcoin , which was created less than two years earlier.
It was the first time Bitcoin caught mainstream attention, and its anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, appealed to WikiLeaks in a Bitcoin Talk post to “not to try to use Bitcoin” as “the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”
Nakamoto’s second-last-ever post in late December 2010 before he vanished said that “WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us,” adding that it “would have been nice to get this attention in any other context.”
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The administration of President Donald Trump first charged Assange in April 2019, when he had been holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London for seven years after fleeing there to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations, which were later dropped.
U.K. authorities removed him from the location that same month and placed him in Belmarsh Prison. He has been contesting his U.S. extradition since then.
The U.S. charges sparked outrage from Assange’s supporters and press freedom advocates, which called them a threat to free speech and argued that publishing information is not a criminal act.
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