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Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was released from a British prison Monday evening as part of a plea deal he has struck with the U.S. Justice Department, capping a yearslong legal saga centered on WikiLeaks' publication of state secrets.
Now 52, Assange is expected to appear at a federal courthouse in Saipan, a U.S. Pacific territory, and plead guilty to one count of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information, according to a letter from the DOJ. The deal will reportedly carry a sentence of five years, time he has already served in British prison.
Assange will then return to Australia, his home country, as a free man.
“After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars,” WikiLeaks said in a statement.
The court hearing Tuesday should mark the end of a drawn-out legal battle over his role in the largest leaks of classified documents in U.S. history, including information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
For years, Assange had been alternately lauded as a symbol of press freedom and condemned as a traitor. Human rights groups have also criticized WikiLeaks for failing to redact the names of thousands of people in some of the documents it published, endangering the lives of Afghans identified as having helped the U.S. military.
Assange was indicted in 2019 on 18 espionage charges, which carried a maximum sentence of 170 years in prison. He had long fought extradition to the United States. His court appearance in Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, was arranged due to its proximity to Australia and to Assange's opposition to appearing in a court within the continental U.S., according to the DOJ letter.
Assange was also accused in 2010 of sexual assault by two women in Stockholm. He sought asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over the claims, which he denied; Sweden dropped that investigation in 2019. After Ecuador revoked his asylum status, Assange was swiftly arrested by the British police and incarcerated at Belmarsh prison for 50 weeks initially for having jumped bail.