Julian Assange concludes agreement with Australia and returns to Australia

After years of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is fighting extradition from the UK to the US. He is accused of publishing secret cables about the Iraq war. According to court documents filed on Monday, he has negotiated a deal with federal prosecutors. The Justice Department expects Assange to return to Australia after a hearing on Tuesday morning.

The agreement would end Assange’s long-running conflict with the White House, which has led to diplomatic tensions and global concern about U.S. hypocrisy in promoting press freedom.

In 2018, the Justice Department filed charges against Assange in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, for hacking and unauthorized access to classified information. After living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for nearly seven years, he was arrested and extradited to face US charges in 2019. Last month, a London court ruled that Assange could continue to appeal his extradition.

On Monday, federal prosecutors filed an updated indictment in the U.S. District Court in the Northern Mariana Islands, along with a letter requesting a hearing on Tuesday. According to the letter, prosecutors expect Assange to plead guilty. The remote district was chosen “in light of the defendant’s refusal to travel to the continental United States to enter his guilty plea,” as well as its proximity to Australia, the letter said.

“We thank the court for conducting this plea bargain and sentencing process in a single day,” prosecutors wrote to Presiding District Judge Ramona V. Manglona, ​​who scheduled a hearing for 9 a.m. Tuesday, according to the case file.

The updated charging documents accuse Assange of “unlawfully conspiring with Chelsea Manning” to access and disseminate classified information without lawful access between 2009 and 2011. In January 2017, shortly before leaving office, former President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence after she had served seven years behind bars.

As recently as April, President Joe Biden said he was “considering” dropping the charges and extradition attempt against Assange, something he had been urged to do by press freedom organizations in the United States and around the world.

After Biden confirmed that negotiations were underway, The Intercept asked the State Department about progress and received the administration’s first substantive response to the question, although it left little clarity: “One of the crimes Julian Assange is accused of is helping Chelsea Manning hack into government systems,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in April, “which, to my knowledge, has never been considered a legitimate journalistic practice.”

Pressure from Australia played a major role in the politics of the prosecution. The Australian government opposed Assange’s extradition to the US. Australian lawmakers travelled to the US to lobby their American counterparts and urged US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy to intervene. Last August, Kennedy raised the possibility that the deal could now go ahead.

Press freedom advocates welcomed the end of the Assange saga but worried about the precedent it would set.

“A deal would avert the worst-case scenario for press freedom, but this deal requires Assange to spend five years in prison for activities that journalists engage in every day,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

“It is good news that the Justice Department is putting an end to this embarrassing saga,” said Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “While the deal does not have the precedent of a court ruling, it will loom over the heads of reporters covering national security for years to come.”

“The government could have simply dropped the case, but instead chose to legitimize the criminalization of routine journalistic conduct and encourage future administrations to follow suit,” Stern said. “And they made that decision knowing that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.”

Assange’s wife Stella struck a more triumphant tone after news of the deal broke. “Julian is free!!!!” she tweeted, posting a video of Assange boarding a plane. WikiLeaks tweeted that Assange “left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of June 24th after spending 1901 days there.”

WikiLeaks’ release of over 250,000 unredacted U.S. State Department cables beginning in 2010 was one of the most consequential data breaches in U.S. government history. In addition to the cables, which continue to serve as a source of information for journalists, activists and investigators fighting corruption around the world, WikiLeaks also released incriminating material about U.S. conduct in the war on terror, including footage from a U.S. military helicopter showing the killing of civilians and Reuters journalists during a 2007 attack in Baghdad, Iraq.