“He will be a free man once it is signed off by a judge,” she said, adding that she still didn’t think it was real.
She posted on the social media platform X that Assange will owe $520,000 to the Australian government for the charter flight, and asked for donations to help pay for it.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, said the deal for Assange came about after the growing involvement of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“This is the result of a long, long process which has been going on for some time. It has been a tough battle, but the focus now is on Julian being reunited with his family,” Hrafnsson told the PA news agency.
In a statement posted on the social media platform X, WikiLeaks said Assange boarded a plane after leaving the high-security London prison where he has spent the last five years. WikiLeaks applauded the announcement of the deal, saying it was grateful for “all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.”
Albanese told Parliament that an Australian envoy had flown with Assange from London.
“Regardless of the views that people have about Mr. Assange’s activities, the case has dragged on for too long,” Albanese said. “There’s nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia.”
The deal ensures that Assange will admit guilt while also sparing him additional prison time. He is expected to be sentenced to the five years he has already spent in the British prison while fighting extradition to the U.S. to face charges, a process that has played out in a series of hearings in London.
Last month, he won the right to appeal an extradition order after his lawyers argued that the U.S. government provided “blatantly inadequate” assurances that he would have the same free speech protections as an American citizen if extradited from Britain.
Assange has been heralded by many around the world as a hero who brought to light military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
But his reputation was also tarnished by the rape allegations, which he has denied.
The Justice Department’s indictment unsealed in 2019 accused Assange of encouraging and helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks published in 2010. Prosecutors had accused Assange of damaging national security (sic) by publishing documents that harmed the U.S. and its allies and aided its adversaries.
The case was lambasted by press advocates and Assange supporters. Federal prosecutors defended it as targeting conduct that went way beyond that of a journalist gathering information, amounting to an attempt to solicit, steal and indiscriminately publish classified government documents.
The plea agreement comes months after President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia to drop the U.S. push to prosecute Assange. The White House was not involved in the decision to resolve Assange’s case, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Assange made headlines again in 2016 after his website published Democratic emails that prosecutors say were stolen by Russian intelligence operatives. He was never charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, but the inquiry laid bare in stark detail the role that the hacking operation played in interfering in that year’s election on behalf of then-Republican candidate Donald Trump.
[This is a classic case of lying and defaming via "truth by repetition of a lie" plus misdirection, and integral to the Russiagate hoax. For starters, the Assange role in the "Russian meddling" offense, itself a gross exaggeration if not outright lie, is peripheral and incidental at best. Second, there was no hacking of DNC files. The DNC "hack" was instead a "leak" by an insider, with most evidence pointing to Seth Rich, murdered on July 16, 2016 by unknown assailant(s). Even a retired high NSA officer has stated that the infiltration of DNC secrets was carried out via a leak, not a hack, as hacks leave many traces that would have been found by the FBI, NSA and other agencies. Further, the official story according to the Metro police is that he was shot and killed in an attemped robbery, although nothing seems to have been taken from Rich. The case has also been notoriously underinvestigated, suggesting that the incident was a political case, similar to Epstein's.]