WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his homeland Australia aboard a charter jet and raised a celebratory clenched fist as his supporters cheered on Wednesday, hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a drawn-out legal saga.
Assange told Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in a phone call from the capital Canberra's airport tarmac that Australian government intervention in the U.S. prosecution had saved his life, Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson said.
Assange embraced his wife Stella Assange and father John Shipton who were waiting on the tarmac, but avoided media at a news conference less than than two hours after he landed.
Assange was accused of receiving and publishing hundreds of thousands of war logs and diplomatic cables that included details of U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The case came to a surprise end in a most unusual setting with Assange, 52, entering his plea in a U.S. district court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands.
The American commonwealth in the Pacific is relatively close to Assange's native Australia and accommodated his desire to avoid entering the continental United States.
Albanese said Assange told him during their phone call he was looking forward to playing with his sons, conceived while the father was in self-exile in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years.
Assange's British court hearings in which he fought extradition to the United States had heard evidence of his failing health and potential risk for self-harm in the U.S. penal system.
Assange was accompanied on the flights by Australian Ambassador to the United States Kevin Rudd and High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Stephen Smith, both of whom played key roles in negotiating his freedom with London and Washington.
It is unclear where Assange will go from Canberra and what his future plans are.
His South African-born lawyer wife and mother of his two children, Stella Assange, has been in Australia for days awaiting his release.
Another of Julian Assange's lawyers, Barry Pollack, expected his client would continue vocal campaigning.
The plea deal required Assange to admit guilt to a single felony count but also permitted him to return to Australia without any time in an American prison.
Assange, for his part, signaled a begrudging contentment with the resolution, saying in court that though he believed the Espionage Act contradicted the First Amendment, he accepted the consequences of soliciting classified information from sources for publication.
Prosecutors alleged that Assange teamed with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain the records, including by conspiring to crack a Defense Department computer password, and published them without regard to American national security.
The indictment was unsealed in 2019, but Assange's legal woes long predated the criminal case and continued well past it.
Weeks after the release of the largest document cache in 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman's allegation of rape and another's allegation of molestation.
Assange has long maintained his innocence, and the investigation was later dropped.
He remained locked up for the last five years while the Justice Department sought to extradite him, in a process that encountered skepticism from British judges who worried about how Assange would be treated by the U.S. Ultimately the resolution sparing Assange prison time in the U.S. contradicts years of ominous warnings by Assange and his supporters that the American criminal justice system would expose him to unduly harsh treatment, including potentially the death penalty - something prosecutors never sought.
Assange on Monday had left the London prison where he has spent the last five years after being granted bail during a secret hearing last week.
This Cyber News was published on www.securityweek.com. Publication date: Wed, 26 Jun 2024 19:13:05 +0000