WikiLeaks founder returns to Australia after guilty plea

Julian Assange on Wednesday landed in Australia as a free man 12 years after he sought asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Assange on Wednesday morning pleaded guilty to a felony charge of violating the U.S. Espionage Act by conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defense information. The hearing was held in Saipan in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.

What is the timeline of this case? Assange in 2006 co-founded the website WikiLeaks which analyzes and publishes classified and restricted information. The website in 2010 released footage of a helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed about a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists. Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, who goes by the name Chelsea and is a man who self-identifies as a woman, provided the video and hundreds of thousands of classified documents about the war in Afghanistan, Iraq and other matters of national security.

In 2010, Swedish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Assange on separate allegations of molestation and rape. Assange denied the allegations. He was arrested in London and released on bail. The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court in 2012 ruled he should be extradited to Sweden and Assange then entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London to seek asylum.

In 2018, the Eastern District Court of Virginia indicted Assange and charged him with conspiring with Manning. Police in London arrested him in 2019 and put him in a high-security prison where he stayed until this week. Manning served seven years in military prison before former President Barack Obama granted him clemency in 2018.

Dig deeper: From the archives, read Leigh Jones’ report about Manning’s 35 year prison sentence.