Key takeaways:
- After accepting a plea agreement with authorities, Julian Assange was released from a London prison on Monday after serving more than five years.
- His sentence hearing on the island of Saipan is scheduled for Wednesday, June 25.
After accepting a plea agreement with authorities, Julian Assange was released from a London prison on Monday after serving more than five years. He will not be extradited to the United States.
According to documents filed by US prosecutors in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, Reuters reported on June 24 that the founder of WikiLeaks had entered a guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to obtain and leak US national defense material.
He has been detained in London’s Belmarsh Prison since April 2019 and faces a probable sentence of five years and three months in prison. His sentence hearing on the island of Saipan is scheduled for Wednesday, June 25.
Assange was granted bail by the High Court and took a flight out of the UK on Monday, finally returning to his home country of Australia, according to a June 24 X post by WikiLeaks.
Over 700,000 classified US documents and diplomatic cables about the country’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were made public by WikiLeaks in 2010 thanks to leaks by former military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
WikiLeaks was able to raise money until PayPal closed its account in December 2010, at which point the publisher resorted to Bitcoin, which had only been around for a little over two years.
In a Bitcoin Talk post, its anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, pleaded with WikiLeaks “not to try to use Bitcoin” because the heat “they would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.” This was the first time Bitcoin gained widespread attention.
In April 2019, Assange was originally charged by the Trump administration while hiding out in Ecuador’s London embassy for seven years. He had fled to Sweden to escape being extradited there on charges of sexual assault, which were eventually withdrawn.
That following month, he was taken out of the location by British officials and lodged in Belmarsh Prison, where he has since been fighting his extradition to the US.
Assange’s followers and proponents of press freedom expressed indignation at the US charges, calling them a threat to free speech and arguing that disseminating information is not illegal.
