The Wikileaks founder expected to plead guilty to one charge in the US, receiving credit for time served in the UK.
Julian Assange was released from a London prison on Monday after serving a sentence of over five years. He has consented to a plea agreement with authorities, which will prevent him from being extradited to the United States.
Reuters reported on June 24 that the founder of WikiLeaks had consented to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose U.S. national defense information. The report was based on filings by U.S. prosecutors in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
In exchange, he is expected to be sentenced to five years and three months of time served, which he has already served at Belmarsh Prison in London since his incarceration in April 2019.
He has been scheduled for a sentencing hearing on Wednesday, June 25, at 11 p.m. UTC, corresponding to 9 a.m. local time on the island of Saipan.
In a post on June 24, WikiLeaks reported that the High Court granted Assange parole, and he departed the United Kingdom on Monday to return to his homeland of Australia.
In 2010, Chelsea Manning, a former military intelligence analyst, published more than 700,000 classified U.S. documents and diplomatic cables regarding the United States’ conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq on WikiLeaks.
In December 2010, WikiLeaks’ account, which was utilized to raise funds, was terminated by PayPal. Subsequently, the publisher resorted to Bitcoin (BTC), established less than two years ago.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, urged WikiLeaks in a Bitcoin Talk post to refrain from attempting to use the cryptocurrency, as the “heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.” This was the first time Bitcoin had garnered mainstream attention.
Nakamoto’s second-to-last post, published in late December 2010 before his disappearance, stated, “WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.” He also expressed his desire to receive attention in a different context.
In April 2019, the Trump administration initiated charges against Assange, who had been residing in Ecuador’s embassy in London for seven years. Assange had fled to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations, which were subsequently withdrawn.
In the same month, British authorities removed him from the location. They incarcerated him in Belmarsh Prison, where he has been arguing against his extradition to the United States ever since.
Assange’s supporters and press freedom advocates expressed their outrage at the U.S. charges, claiming they constituted a threat to free expression and that publishing information is not criminal.
