WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange freed by U.S. court after guilty plea

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his homeland Australia aboard a charter jet on Wednesday, hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with U.S. Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a drawn-out legal saga.

The dealwith U.S. Justice Department prosecutorssecures Assange'sliberty and concludes a drawn-out legal saga that raised questions about press freedom and national security.

The criminal case of international intrigue, which had played out for years in major world stages of Washington and London, came to a surprise end in a most unusual setting with Assange, 52,enteringhis plea Wednesday morning in federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands.

The American commonwealth in the Pacific is relatively close to Assange's native Australia and accommodated his desire to avoid entering the continental United States.

The deal required the iconoclastic internet publisher to admit guilt to a single felony count, but also permitted him to return to Australia without serving any time in an American prison.

The judge sentenced him to the five years he'd spent behind barsin the United Kingdom, 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. He was holed up for seven years before that in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

He smiled slightly as U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona imposed a sentence and pronounced him a "free man."

Assange left the court through a throng of TV cameras and photographers without answering questions, then waved as he got into a white SUV.

It is unclear where Assange will go from Canberra and what his future plans are. His South African lawyer wife and mother of his two children, Stella Assange, has been in Australia for days awaiting her husband's release.

He was accompanied on the last leg of his journey from the U.K. to Australia by Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister and current Australian Ambassador to the U.S.

The flights were paid for by the "Assange team," Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said, noting his government played a role in facilitating the transport.

WikiLeaks applauds deal

The conclusion enables both sides to claim a degree of satisfaction. The Justice Department, facing a defendant who had already served substantial jail time, was able to resolve without trial a case that raised thorny legal issues and that might never have reached a jury at all given the plodding pace of the extradition process.

Assange, for his part, signalled a begrudging contentment with the resolution, saying in court that though he believed the Espionage Act contradicted the First Amendment, he accepted the consequences of soliciting classified information from sources for publication.

Jennifer Robinson, one of Assange's lawyers, told reporters after the hearing that the case "sets a dangerous precedent that should be a concern to journalists everywhere."

"It's a huge relief to Julian Assange, to his family, to his friends, to his supporters and to usto everyone who believes in free speech around the world that he can now return home to his Australia and be reunited with his family," she said.

The secret-spilling website WikiLeaks, which Assange founded in 2006, said in its own statement after the deal was revealed that it was grateful for "all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom."

In court on Wednesday, Assange answered basic questions from Manglona, an appointee of former U.S. president Barack Obama, and appeared to listen intently as terms of the deal were discussed.

WATCH | Hear Stella Assange describe her range of emotions right now:

Julian Assanges wife says his release will be real once they reunite

4 months ago

Duration 0:37

Stella Assange, speaking from Australia, says she will 'worry' until she sees her husband following his release from a British prison as part of a plea deal with the U.S. government.

Assange appeared upbeat and relaxed during the hearing, at times cracking jokes with the judge. While signing his plea agreement, he made a joke about the nine-hour time difference between the U.K. and Saipan.

At another point, when the judge asked him whether he was satisfied with the plea conditions, Assange responded: "It might depend on the outcome," sparking some laughter in the courtroom.

Assangetoreturn to Australia

The plea deal, disclosed Monday night in a sparsely detailed Justice Department letter, represents the latest and presumably final chapter in a court fight involving the eccentric Australian computer expert who has been celebrated by supporters as a transparency crusader but lambasted by national security hawks who insist that his disdain for government secrecy put lives at risks and strayed far beyond the bounds of traditional journalism duties.

The guilty plea resolves a criminal case brought by former U.S.president Donald Trump's administration in connection withthe receipt and publication of war logs and diplomatic cables that detailed U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Prosecutors alleged that Assange conspired with former army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain the records, including by conspiring to crack a Defence Department computer password, and published them without regard to American national security. Names of human sources who provided information to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were among the details exposed, prosecutors have said.

But Assange's activities drew an outpouring of support from press freedom advocates, who heralded his role in bringing to light military conduct that might otherwise have been concealed from view.

Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.

For their part, Manning served about six years in prison before having their sentence commuted by Obama in one of his final acts as president.

Assange's history of legal woes

Weeks after the release of the largest document cache in 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman's allegation of rape and another's allegation of molestation. Assange has long maintained his innocence, and the investigation was later dropped.

He 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, hosting a parade of celebrity visitors and making periodic appearances from the building's balcony to address supporters.

In 2019, his hosts revoked his asylum, allowing British police to arrest him. He remained locked up for the last five years while the Justice Department sought to extradite him, a process that encountered skepticism from British judges who worried about how Assange would be treated by the American criminal justice system.

Ultimately, though, the resolution sparing Assange prison time in the U.S. is a repudiation of sorts of years of ominous warnings by him and his supporters that the American criminal justice system would expose him to unduly harsh treatment, including potentially the death penalty something prosecutors never sought.

Last month, Assange won the right to appeal an extradition order after his lawyers argued that the U.S. government provided "blatantly inadequate" assurances that he would have the same free speech protections as an American citizen if extradited from Britain.