He is set to make an appearance in a U.S. Court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has entered into an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in which he will plead guilty to a conspiracy charge, allowing him to avoid extradition to the United States and walk free in lieu of time already served behind bars, according to court documents.
The plea agreement, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, a commonwealth of the United States in the western Pacific Ocean, indicates that Mr. Assange was charged with one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.
A letter from a DOJ official to Judge Ramona V. Manglona of the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands shows that Mr. Assange is set to make a court appearance in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, on the morning of June 26. During that court appearance, Mr. Assange is expected to enter a guilty plea to the charge.
The DOJ official—Matthew J. McKenzie, deputy chief of the counterintelligence and export control section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division—wrote in the letter that Mr. Assange would be returned to his home country of Australia after entering the plea.
“We appreciate the Court accommodating these plea and sentencing proceedings on a single day at the joint request of the parties, in light of the defendant’s opposition to traveling to the continental United States to enter his guilty plea and the proximity of this federal U.S. District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of the proceedings,” Mr. McKenzie wrote.
Under the terms of the plea deal, Mr. Assange will serve no additional time than the 62 months that he’s already served in a British prison.
Before spending five years in a prison in the UK, Mr. Assange spent seven years at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was granted refuge until his asylum was revoked and he was carried out of the embassy and arrested.
Mr. Assange has been fighting extradition to the United States for over 10 years.
By Tom Ozimek
