The flight took off from Bangkok for the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth in the Pacific, where in a district court he is expected to be sentenced to the more than five years he already served in a UK prison.Under the plea deal, the 52-year-old will escape a potentially lengthy sentence in the US. If he had been convicted, Assange could have faced a maximum of 170 years in a federal prison.
The plea deal brings an abrupt conclusion to a criminal case of international intrigue and to the US govt’s yearslong pursuit of a publisher whose hugely popular secret-sharing website made him a cause celebre among many press freedom advocates who said he acted as a journalist to expose US military wrongdoing. US prosecutors, in contrast, have asserted that his actions broke law and put the nation’s security at risk.
WikiLeaks came to prominence in 2010 after it released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with swaths of diplomatic cables. The trove of more than 700,000 documents included battlefield accounts such as a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.
Negotiations toward a plea agreement heated up in recent months after Prez Biden said he was considering a request from the Australian govt to strike a deal. However, a White House National Security Council spokesman said the move was an independent decision made by the justice department. Allies of Assange celebrated the plea deal, including former Australian deputy PM Barnaby Joyce who said the result was the work of international lobbying from across the political spectrum in Washington.