Julian Assange strikes plea deal with US

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty to US criminal charges as part of a deal that allows him to go free, according to court documents.

Assange, 52, was charged with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information.

For years, the US has argued that the Wikileaks files – which disclosed information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – endangered lives.

He has spent the last five years in a British prison, from where he has been fighting extradition to the US.

According to CBS, the BBC’s US partner, Assange will spend no time in US custody and will receive credit for the time spent incarcerated in the UK.

Assange will return to Australia, according to a letter from the justice department.

The deal – which will see him plead guilty to one charge – is expected to be finalised in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday, 26 June.

His attorney, Richard Miller, declined to comment when contacted by CBS.

He and his lawyers had long claimed that the case against him was politically motivated.

In April, US President Joe Biden said that he was considering a request from Australia to drop the prosecution against Assange.

US prosecutors had originally wanted to try the Wikileaks founder on 18 counts – mostly under the Espionage Act – over the release of confidential US military records and diplomatic messages related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Wikileaks, which Assange founded in 2006, claims to have published over 10 million documents in what the US government later described as “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States”.

In 2010, the website published a video from a US military helicopter which more than a dozen Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters news reporters, being killed in Baghdad.

One of Assange’s most well-known collaborators, US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, was sentenced to 35 years in prison before then-president Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.

Assange also faced separate charges of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, which he denied.

He spent seven years hiding in Ecuador’s London embassy, claiming the Swedish case would lead him to be sent to the US.

Swedish authorities dropped the case in 2019 and said that too much time had passed since the original complaint, but UK authorities later took him into custody. He was tried for not surrendering to the courts to be extradited to Sweden.