WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange expected to plead guilty to felony charge (2024)

He is expected to be sentenced on Wednesday in the Northern Mariana Islands, according to a letter filed by the Justice Department in the remote U.S. jurisdiction Monday evening. He will then return to his home country of Australia, the letter says, indicating he will be sentenced to the 62 months he has already spent behind bars in a London prison.

A criminal information filed alongside the letter says Assange “knowingly and unlawfully conspired” with Chelsea Manning to “receive and obtain documents … connected with the national defense” and “communicate” that information to “persons not entitled to receive” it. Manning, then a young Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, was convicted of violating the Espionage Act and other laws at a court-martial in 2013.

“This period of our lives, I’m confident now, has come to an end,” his wife and attorney Stella Assange said in a video statement filmed last Wednesday and released after the court documents were filed. “Julian will be free.”

Assange, whose snow-white hair became recognizable worldwide, was a polarizing figure. Supporters saw him as a courageous journalist whistleblower of government misdeeds, but his detractors saw a pompous self-promoter interested primarily in fame and oblivious to the harm his leaks might cause.

He burst into the American public consciousness in the 2010s, when WikiLeaks began publishing several bombshell disclosures. They included hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. military documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of confidential diplomatic cables that included candid and sometimes unflattering assessments by U.S. officials of partners overseas — including foreign heads of state whose help was needed to counter terrorism.

He famously in 2016 published emails that Russian government hackers had stolen from Democratic Party servers and that U.S. authorities assessed were leaked by Moscow in an effort to disrupt the presidential election. He was not charged in connection with those documents.

Assange had eluded authorities for years by holing up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He arrived there in 2012 on the run from Swedish authorities, who were investigating him for sexual assault. That case was ultimately dropped, but in 2018 the Trump administration indicted Assange under seal for computer hacking. Ecuador expelled Assange from the embassy the following year, accusing him of violating the terms of his asylum, in part because of his “discourteous and aggressive behavior.”

He was immediately arrested by British authorities on the U.S. charge.

Extradition efforts began soon after. But Assange’s attorneys argued that he could not get a fair trial in the United States and that his mental health was too fragile to withstand transfer to an American prison, claims that have been debated in British courts for the past five years.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department expanded the case against Assange to include 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. Those charges, which make it a felony to gather, transmit or communicate without authorization “national defense information” — generally understood to be classified information — immediately raised concerns from press freedom advocates who saw little distinction, at least on the surface, between WikiLeaks publishing leaked documents and traditional media reporting information related to national defense and intelligence.

It marked the first time the U.S. government was seeking to prosecute someone for publishing government secrets, civil liberties advocates say.

Assange’s brash methods differed from norms of the traditional press. WikiLeaks’ Afghan War Logs disclosures were published with little vetting, for instance, to obscure the names of Afghan civilians who had provided information to the U.S. military — an omission that dismayed human rights groups and infuriated national security officials in the Obama administration.

Justice Department officials sought to make a distinction between Assange and traditional reporters, including in charging papers evidence that Assange tried to crack a Defense Department code and directed associates to hack computers and steal phone records.

“Julian Assange is no journalist,” said John Demers, then the assistant attorney general for national security, when the charges were unsealed in 2019. He said Assange had engaged in “explicit solicitation of classified information.”

But First Amendment advocates fear the charges and guilty plea could open the door to prosecutions of American media companies for their work on national security matters.

“It’s alarming that the Biden administration felt the need to extract a guilty plea for the purported crime of obtaining and publishing government secrets. That’s what investigative journalists do every day,” Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation said in a statement. “And they made that choice knowing that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.”

Bruce D. Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, noted the plea deal’s convenient compromise — Assange admits he broke the law, without the Justice Department having to prove he did. “The Justice Department argued that the sole act of publishing government secrets violates the Espionage Act,” Brown said, noting his organization would have “vigorously contested that reading of the statute had Assange been put on trial in the U.S. But with this reported plea agreement, a potentially dangerous precedent for national security journalism would be avoided.”

Critics of the tentative plea deal argued against leniency. “Julian Assange rightly admitted he violated the law, putting thousands of American soldiers’ and informants’ lives at risk,” said Jamil N. Jaffer, executive director of the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. “The fact that he’ll only get time served is a crime in and of itself. He should be serving a life sentence.”

It took nearly a decade from WikiLeaks’ publication of diplomatic and military leaks for the United States to prosecute Assange, amid debates over whether he should be charged with hacking or espionage and disagreement over whether the alleged crimes ran afoul of press freedom protections.

Manning, at her court-martial, expressed a desire to spark a national debate about the nation’s “obsession with killing and capturing people.” She was convicted of violating the Espionage Act, among other charges, and served almost seven years of a 35-year sentence before having her sentence commuted in 2017 by President Barack Obama.

Obama’s administration had passed on the Assange case, seeking to avoid the thorny First Amendment issue, but it never formally closed the investigation.

In negotiating the plea deal, the U.S. government had already agreed that if Assange were convicted at trial in the United States, he could serve his sentence in his home country of Australia — one of several concessions made by the Justice Department in its five-year effort to extradite the WikiLeaks founder.

The United States promised Assange would not face any charges that could trigger the death penalty, that he would not be automatically put in solitary confinement, and that he would receive mental health treatment. But Assange’s attorneys repeatedly argued that those promises were insufficient to prevent him from self-harm were he to be in U.S. custody.

Assange’s health deteriorated during his long stay in London’s Belmarsh Prison, family members and his lawyer have told reporters. His brother, Gabriel Shipton, told British media in February that Assange was “going through [an] immense amount of suffering” and “his health is in a very delicate position.” He suffered a mini-stroke in 2021, his wife has said.

According to two people familiar with the discussions, Justice Department officials have for months been discussing ways Assange could be held accountable without extradition to the United States. One possibility floated was that Assange would plead guilty remotely to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information, while the organization WikiLeaks would plead guilty to one of the felony espionage charges.

Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.