This screen grab from the X account of Wikileaks shows Julian Assange on board a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, following his release from prison on Tuesday June 25, 2024.
The agreement also included safety valves that would ensure Assange's liberty in Australia in the unlikely event a judge rejected it at the last minute. At the time of his indictment, Assange was perhaps better well-known for WikiLeaks' involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential contest when the secret-spilling website released tranches of damaging emails about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton that were stolen by Russian military intelligence officers in what officials said was brazen election interference by Moscow.
But the Justice Department in the Trump administration took a different tack. The existence of a criminal case was inadvertently revealed by a filing error in 2018. The first narrowly tailored charge to be unsealed months later was a computer intrusion count that accused him of conspiring with Manning to crack a password that gave her higher-level access to classified computer networks.
About a year and a half ago, in the first substantive communications between the two sides, an Assange lawyer made a presentation to Justice Department prosecutors in Virginia seeking the indictment's dismissal. The prosecutors listened, and though the idea was unworkable, returned months later with a counteroffer: Would Assange consider a guilty plea?
The negotiations were largely held with prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, where the case was charged, but then in the final months with Justice Department national security officials. From the Justice Department's perspective, the more than five years he spent in a high-security British prison was in line, or potentially even greater, than a sentence he might have received in the U.S.In March, a British court ruled that Assange could not be extradited unless U.S. authorities guaranteed he wouldn't get the death penalty and could use the same free-speech defence as a U.S. citizen would.
The deal with the U.S. was reached on June 19, according to London's High Court, one of many behind-the-scenes actions that led to Assange's freedom.
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