WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has pleaded guilty to a single felony charge for obtaining and publishing US military secrets, as part of a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that secures his liberty, The Associated Press reported.
The plea was entered Wednesday morning (local time) in federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, an American commonwealth in the Pacific that accommodated Assange’s desire to avoid entering the continental United States.
Addressing the court, Assange said that he believed the Espionage Act under which he charged contradicted First Amendment rights but that he accepted that encouraging sources to provide classified information for publication can be unlawful.
Though the deal with prosecutors required him to admit guilt to a single felony count, it would also permit him to return to his native Australia without spending any time in an American prison. He had been jailed in the United Kingdom for the last five years, fighting extradition to the United States on an Espionage Act indictment that could have carried a lengthy prison sentence in the event of a conviction.
Assange had faced 18 counts from a 2019 indictment for his alleged role in the breach that carried a max of up to 175 years in prison, though he was unlikely to be sentenced to that time in full.
Assange was pursued by US authorities for publishing confidential military records supplied by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and 2011.
US officials alleged that Assange goaded Manning into obtaining thousands of pages of unfiltered US diplomatic cables that potentially endangered confidential sources, Iraq war-related significant activity reports and information related to Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Assange presented himself in 2012 to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he claimed asylum on the grounds of political persecution, and spent the following seven years in self-exile there.
In 2019, his hosts revoked his asylum, allowing British police to arrest him. He remained in jail for the last five years while the Justice Department sought to extradite him, before the plea deal was revealed on Monday.