Joe.My.God. LGBT News
CNN reports:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge related to his alleged role in one of the largest US government breaches of classified material, as part of a deal with the Justice Department that will allow him to avoid imprisonment in the United States, according to newly filed federal court documents.
Assange was being pursued by US authorities for publishing confidential military records supplied by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and 2011. He 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.
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.
The Guardian reports:
Julian Assange has been released from a British prison and is expected to plead guilty to violating US espionage law, in a deal that would allow him to return home to his native Australia.
Assange, 52, agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents, according to filings in the US district court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
Wikileaks posted on social media a video of its founder boarding a flight at London’s Stansted airport on Monday evening and Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese confirmed he had left the UK. The plane – chartered flight VJT199 – later landed in Bangkok for refuelling, officials at the Thai airport said.
The New York Times reports:
Mr. Assange, 52, was granted his request to appear before a federal judge at one of the more remote outposts of the federal judiciary, the courthouse in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, according to a brief court filing made public late Monday.
He is expected to be sentenced to about five years, the equivalent of the time he has already served in Britain, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the terms of the agreement.
It was a fitting final twist in the case against Mr. Assange, who doggedly opposed extradition to the U.S. mainland. The islands are a United States commonwealth in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — and much closer to Mr. Assange’s native Australia, where he is a citizen, than courts in the continental United States or Hawaii.