The plea deal ends more than a decade of U.S. efforts to prosecute him for leaking classified information. to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a drawn-out legal saga.
“He described it as a surreal and happy moment, his landing here in our national capital, Canberra,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters in Parliament House. “I had a very warm discussion with him this evening. He was very generous in his praise of the Australian government’s efforts.” Another of Julian Assange’s lawyers, Barry Pollack, expected his client would continue vocal campaigning.
The plea deal required Assange to admit guilt to a single felony count but also permitted him to return to Australia without any time in an American prison. The judge sentenced him to the five years he’d already spent behind bars in the U.K. fighting extradition to the U.S. on an Espionage Act indictment that could have carried a lengthy prison sentence in the event of a conviction. He was holed up for seven years before that in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
Weeks after the release of the largest document cache in 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman’s allegation of rape and another’s allegation of molestation. Assange has long maintained his innocence, and the investigation was later dropped.
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