Julian Assange, US Reach Deal; WikiLeaks Founder to Go Free

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has reached a deal with the U.S. government that will allow him to return to Australia.

Assange is expected to plead guilty to one felony charge of conspiring to disseminate classified information, per Politico.

Assange founded WikiLeaks, a website that published American secrets about the war in Iraq.  It also released damning emails about the Democratic Party during the 2016 election.

Details of the deal were made public in court filings Monday night.

Assange would be sentenced to just over five years in prison. However, he is expected to be immediately released given that’s about how long he’s been in jail in England as he fought extradition to the U.S.

Assange’s guilty plea will take place Wednesday morning in U.S. District Court in the Northern Mariana Islands. This is a U.S. territory in the south Pacific about 2,000 miles north of Australia.

According to a letter Justice Department prosecutors posted on a court docket, Assange did not want to return to the continental U.S. due to his distrust of the U.S.

He, as well as his allies, have accused U.S. officials of plotting to have him killed with a drone.

In 2010, Pvt. Chelsea Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, leaked data to WikiLeaks. 

Among the items leaked were videos of “deadly U.S. military airstrikes, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and logs of U.S. military activity in Afghanistan and Iraq,” the outlet reported.

In 2016, his website released volumes of emails from the Democratic National Committee and from a personal Gmail account of John Podesta, who was the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. 

The stolen emails revealed signs that the DNC had acted favorably toward Clinton during the primary against Bernie Sanders.

Some Democrats accused Assange of collaborating with Russian intelligence in an effort to undermine Clinton’s campaign. 

Assange denied the claim.