Julian Assange ends stalemate with US, exchanging guilty plea for his freedom

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked free for the first time in 12 years after a US judge signed off on his unexpected plea deal on Wednesday morning.

Assange walked out of the courtroom as a free man into the bright Saipan sunshine, raising one hand to a gaggle of the world’s press before departing by car for the airport where he caught a flight to the Australian capital Canberra.()

Speaking outside the court, Assange’s US lawyer Barry Pollack said he had “suffered tremendously in his fight for free speech and freedom of the press.”

“The prosecution of Julian Assange is unprecedented in the 100 years of the Espionage Act,” Pollack told reporters. “Mr. Assange revealed truthful, newsworthy information … We firmly believe that Mr. Assange never should have been charged under the Espionage Act and engaged in (an) exercise that journalists engage in every day.”()

In a stunning turn of events, the 52-year-old Australian was released from a high-security prison in London on Monday afternoon and had already boarded a private jet to leave the United Kingdom before the world even knew of his agreement with the US government.

He appeared in a US courtroom on the Northern Mariana Islands to formalize the agreement, officially pleading guilty to conspiring unlawfully to obtain and disseminate classified information over his alleged role in one of the largest breaches of classified material in US military history.

“I am, in fact, guilty of the charge,” Assange told the court in Saipan.(

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The remote Pacific island chain is a US territory, located around 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) west of Hawaii.

Assange - who has long held a deep mistrust of the US, even going so far as accusing it of allegedly plotting his assassination - was hesitant about stepping foot in the continental US, and so prosecutors asked for all proceedings to take place in a day in a US federal court based in Saipan, the largest island and capital of the Northern Mariana Islands.

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