< p>The founder of "Wikileaks" Julian Assange has reached an agreement with the American court, reads a headline in the Swiss newspaper "Liberte".
Under the agreement, Assange pleads guilty in exchange for his release after five years in Britain. The 52-year-old Australian will appear in federal court in the Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific Ocean, on Wednesday at 09:00 local time.
He is currently being prosecuted by the US for "conspiracy to obtain and disclose information related to national defense". He is expected to plead guilty to that charge alone, according to the documents, which also name his accomplice, Chelsea Manning, who is behind the massive leak.
He is expected to be sentenced to 62 months in prison, which he has already served in pre-trial detention in London, allowing him to return to his native Australia free.
The organization "Wikileaks" reported that "Julian Assange is free" and left Great Britain and the maximum security prison outside London, where he had been since 2019, and departed by plane from Stansted Airport.
He will be reunited with his wife Stella Assange and their children, "as a result of a worldwide campaign,", the organization said.
If there are no last-minute snags, the settlement will end a protracted legal battle that began a decade ago when the founder of "WikiLeaks" became both a revered and hated figure for the disclosure of American state secrets, notes the "New York Times".
They included material on US military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as confidential grammes shared between diplomats. During the 2016 campaign, "Wikileaks" also published thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, leading to revelations disparaging the party and Hillary Clinton's campaign.
If convicted of all 18 charges originally brought against him, Assange could have faced up to 170 years in US federal prison.
His release was not unexpected. Earlier this year, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urged US prosecutors to drop the case, and US President Joe Biden made it clear he was open to a quick resolution. Senior officials at the US Department of Justice accepted a plea deal with no additional prison terms because Assange had already served a longer term than most people charged with a similar crime - in this case more than five years in prison in Britain.
Assange and his supporters have long argued that his efforts to obtain and publicly release sensitive U.S. national security information are in the public interest and deserve the same First Amendment protection afforded to investigative journalists.
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In 2021, a coalition of human rights groups called on the Biden administration to drop its efforts to extradite Assange from Britain and prosecute him, calling the case a "serious threat" for freedom of the press. According to them, most of the actions in which he is accused are similar to the regular actions of journalists. "News organizations often and necessarily publish classified information to inform the public about matters of great public importance," the group emphasizes.
But US officials say Assange's actions go far beyond news gathering and put national security at risk. Materials provided by Manning have endangered the lives of service members and Iraqis who work with the US military and made it difficult to counter external threats.
Supporters and former colleagues of the jailed WikiLeaks founder have reacted with joy to reports that he has reached a plea deal with US prosecutors, writes the UK's "Independent".
Meanwhile, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who like Assange worked with US government sources to expose a massive global surveillance program from 2012-2014, said yesterday he was "disappointed" from the decision of the founder of "Wikileaks" to plead guilty but supports him.
"I firmly believe that he is not guilty of anything and that if nothing else, he should be compensated for wrongful imprisonment," Greenwald said. "But he is married. He has two children who are now growing up; I think they are seven and eight years old. And the ordeal he has been put through in the last 15 years is almost impossible to describe in words," he said.
Greenwald adds that he believes the U.S. government never wanted a public trial against Assange, but simply to "crush him, physically and mentally," while sending a message to "future Julian Sanjoists" that "if they publish our secrets, we ruin their lives".