In a deal with U.S. prosecutors, Russian asset and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty to one charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. defense documents, and be released from custody later today. U.S. prosecutors say that Assange will be credited with the time he's served in a British prison and face no additional time. From Reuters:
"U.S. prosecutors said in court papers that Assange, 52, has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. national defense documents, according to filings in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
Assange is due to be sentenced at a hearing on the island of Saipan at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday (1900 EDT/2300 GMT on Tuesday). He is likely to be credited for the time he has already served and face no new jail time.
WikiLeaks in 2010 released hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - the largest security breaches of their kind in U.S. military history - along with swaths of diplomatic cables."
Assange was served with an arrest warrant in Britain for sexual assault in Sweden in 2010, but fled to the Ecuadorian embassy where he was given asylum until being kicked out in 2019. Nearly all investigations at WikiLeaks have involved the leak of U.S. and western allies' secrets, rather than from Russia, China or Iran, in an indication of the organization's political bias.
(photo: Assange dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy. NBC News screenshot)
