“Guilty of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information.”
Few and yet heavy words to put an end to a judicial ordeal that lasted 14 years. Julian Assange pleaded guilty before American justice in the court of Saipan, on the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific Ocean. The admission of the 52-year-old founder of Wikileaks was part of the plea bargaining process granted by American President Joe Biden, which allowed him to leave for his native Australia as a free man.
Dark suit, ocher tie, white hair combed back, according to the journalists present in the courtroom Assange was calm and in a good mood. After pleading guilty he even joked to Judge Ramona Manglona that he was “waiting for the outcome of the hearing to be satisfied”. Then he was sentenced to five years and two months, exactly the time he had already spent in the maximum security prison near London. A necessary but formal ritual, especially since the Australian signed the plea agreement on June 24 in the United Kingdom, before boarding the private jet paid for with a fundraiser of over half a million dollars. “I read it thoroughly,” he said of the agreement.
And when the judge asked him what he had done to commit the crime he is accused of, Assange replied: “I encouraged my source to provide classified information in order to publish it. I believe the First Amendment protects such activity…” . The founder of Wikileaks therefore did not give up on taking a pebble out of his shoe, underlining that in his opinion “the First Amendment and the Espionage Act are in contradiction to each other, but I accept that it would be difficult to win such a case given all these circumstances “.
Wife Stella admitted they “weren’t sure until the last 24 hours that this was actually happening.” WikiLeaks announced on X that Assange will leave for Australia in the next few hours, adding that the plea deal “should never have happened”. The Canberra government, which had been pressuring Washington for months to reach this conclusion, said the case “has dragged on for too long”. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese defined the agreement reached between US justice and Assange as “a welcome development”.
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