The story so far: In a dramatic conclusion to an extradition saga that lasted more than a decade, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on June 26 pleaded guilty to violating espionage law, allowing him to walk free to return to his home in Australia, as part of a landmark deal with U.S. Justice Department.

Mr. Assange, who founded the whistleblower media group WikiLeaks in 2006, released classified documents relating to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010, among several others. He was sentenced to the five years he had already served in a British prison while fighting to avoid extradition to the U.S. Mr. Assange had left the British prison on June 24 to appear before a U.S. federal court in the Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific.

Julian Assange and the cases against him

Born in 1971 in Townsville, Australia, Julian Assange studied mathematics and physics at the University of Melbourne but dropped out before completing his degree. In 2006, he launched WikiLeaks, which publishes large datasets of “censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption.”

Also Read | How did WikiLeaks get Julian Assange in so much trouble?

The website first grabbed global attention in 2010 when it published a cache of around half a million sensitive military files on Iraq and Afghanistan, including a classified video from 2007 that showed an Apache helicopter firing indiscriminately, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters correspondents in Baghdad. Around 250,000 secret diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies were also released.

The leaks caused ripples across the globe, with the U.S. government launching an inquiry into one of the largest security breaches in its military history.

In September 2010, Mr. Assange fled to Britain after an investigation was launched into alleged sex crimes by him, based on the accusations of two Swedish WikiLeaks volunteers. The British police arrested him two months later. The WikiLeaks founder, however, denied the charges and claimed that the case was a pretext to extradite him to the U.S. He subsequently filed multiple pleas against extradition to Sweden but relief evaded him. In June 2012, shortly after the UK Supreme Court rejected his final challenge against extradition to Sweden, Mr. Assange went to the Ecuadorean embassy in London seeking asylum. While the Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2017, the British police maintained that Mr. Assange would be arrested. He remained in the embassy for seven years.

While Julian Assange’s lawyers argued that he had exposed U.S. wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. government said his actions were beyond those of a journalist gathering information and had put lives at risk.

Meanwhile, former intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who had accessed the U.S. Department of Defense database and uploaded classified files onto a WikiLeaks dropbox, spent seven years in prison before then President Barack Obama commuted the remainder of her 35-year sentence. The U.S. administration said it won’t pursue criminal charges against Mr. Assange or WikiLeaks. 

The extradition saga

In 2016, ahead of the U.S. presidential election, the spotlight was back on the website after it released thousands of emails belonging to John Podesta, the aide of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. As per prosecutors, Russian intelligence operatives had stolen the emails and used the anti-secrecy website to improve Donald Trump’s chances of victory.

The new Trump administration, which held a different view, charged the WikiLeaks founder with collaboration in a conspiracy. A U.S. court later indicted Mr. Assange on 17 additional charges related to the violation of the Espionage Act of 1917.

As pressure mounted, the Ecuadorian government revoked his asylum in 2019 and Mr. Assange was arrested and jailed for breaching bail conditions in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison.

The U.K. approved Mr. Assange’s extradition in 2022. However, he won the right to appeal the verdict in a final legal bid to stop his extradition. His legal team claimed the case was politically motivated and an assault on the freedom of speech. The U.S. President’s remarks that his administration was “considering” a request from Australia to drop its prosecution was a ray of hope for Mr. Assange’s family.

On June 26, Julian Assange walked out of the Belmarsh Prison where he spent the last five years to appear before a federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands— to secure his freedom as part of a plea deal with the U.S. “Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London…” tweeted WikiLeaks.

What’s the deal? 

Under the deal, Julian Assange admitted guilt to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified documents during the hearing that took place on June 26 in a district court in Saipan.

Mr. Assange said 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, AP reported.

The judge approved his plea, sentenced him to the five years he had already spent in the U.K. fighting extradition, pronouncing him a “free man.”

Julian Assange landed in the Australian capital Canberra on June 26. His wife Stella Assange and their two children have been in Australia awaiting his release.

While it is not yet clear what Mr. Assange’s plans are, his lawyer Barry Pollack has said, “WikiLeaks’ work will continue and Mr. Assange, I have no doubt, will be a continuing force for freedom of speech and transparency in government.”

Australian leaders cautiously welcomed an expected plea agreement that could set free Julian Assange, who was pursued for years over WikiLeaks’ publication of a trove of classified documents.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday there was nothing to be gained by keeping the Australian incarcerated.

A plane chartered by Mr. Assange landed on Tuesday in Bangkok as he heads to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific midway between Australia and Japan, where he is expected to appear in a U.S. federal court on Wednesday.

He is expected to plead guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defence information, the U.S. Justice Department said in a letter filed in court.

Mr. Assange is expected to return to Australia if a judge accepts the plea agreement.

Public support for Mr. Assange has grown in Australia during the seven years he has spent avoiding extradition to the United States by hiding in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and later during his five years in Belmarsh Prison.

Mr. Albanese has been lobbying since his government was elected in 2022 for the United States to end its prosecution of Assange, and his plight was seen as a test of the prime minister’s leverage with President Joe Biden.

Mr. Albanese had been a senior minister in a center-left Labor Party government that in 2010 staunchly backed U.S. criticisms of WikiLeaks’ classified information dumps. But Assange has breached no Australian law.

Mr. Albanese told parliament that Australian High Commissioner to the U.K. Stephen Smith had flown with Mr. Assange from London.

“The government is certainly aware that Australian citizen Mr. Julian Assange has legal proceedings scheduled in the United States. While this is a welcome development, we recognize that these proceedings are crucial and they’re delicate,” Mr. Albanese told parliament.

“Regardless of the views that people have about Mr. Assange’s activities, the case has dragged on for too long. There’s nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia,” Mr. Albanese added.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong acknowledged the advocacy of a range of lawmakers on Mr. Assange’s behalf, including delegates of the Bring Julian Assange Parliamentary Group who travelled to Washington last year with a letter signed by 60 Australian lawmakers calling for the prosecution to end.

Ms. Wong said Mr. Albanese had led the Australian effort, personally raising Mr. Assange with Mr. Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. “We want to see Mr. Assange reunited with his family in Australia,” Ms. Wong told the Senate. She also revealed that Mr. Assange had rejected Australia’s offer of consular visits for years until April last year when Smith made the first of his several prison visits.

Australia had argued there was a disconnect between the U.S. treatment of Mr. Assange and U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, a WikiLeaks source. Then-U.S. President Barack Obama commuted Ms. Manning’s 35-year sentence to seven years, which allowed her release in 2017.

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken pushed back against Mr. Albanese’s position during a visit to Australia last year, saying Mr. Assange was accused of “very serious criminal conduct” in publishing a trove of classified U.S. documents more than a decade ago.

Support for Mr. Assange crossed political party lines in Australia.

Opposition lawmaker and Assange supporter Barnaby Joyce, a former deputy prime minister, said the plea deal was an encouraging development. “We’ve just got to be still cautious, still cautious on how this proceeds because the end has not arrived,” Joyce told reporters in Australia’s Parliament House. He said Assange should not prosecuted because be committed no offense in the United States.

“If you ask me do I think what he did was morally correct? No, it wasn’t,” Mr. Joyce said. “But the issue for me is extraterritoriality.”

Opposition spokesman on foreign affairs Simon Birmingham also welcomed the apparent end to the prosecution. “We have consistently said that the U.S. and U.K. justice systems should be respected,” Birmingham said on social media.

A motion that called for the U.S. and Britain to bring the “matter to a close so that Mr. Assange can return home to his family in Australia” was supported by 86 lawmakers including Albanese in the 151-seat House of Representatives in February.

‘Power of quiet diplomacy’

Mr. Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, said the plea deal “shows the importance and power of quiet diplomacy.” “I am grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end,” she said in a statement.

His father John Shipton used a radio interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp. in Melbourne to thank his son’s supporters. “It looks as though Julian will be free to come back to Australia and my thanks and congratulations to all his supporters in Australia who made it possible and of course Prime Minister Anthony Albanese,” Mr. Shipton said.

Julian Assange’s wife and mother of his two children, Stella Assange, was in Sydney awaiting for her husband’s return to Australia. She posted on social media an image of her talking to her husband on FaceTime and with the Sydney Opera House in the background. She said he was speaking from London’s Stansted Airport before leaving the U.K.

Julian Assange’s lawyer Geoffrey Robertson likened the case to the government-to-government negotiations behind a plea deal in 2007 that enabled Australian al-Qaida supporter David Hicks to be repatriated from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance as a suspected enemy combatant.

“It was much tougher with Assange because the Pentagon was so determined to punish him,” Robertson told ABC. “In the end, I think partly because Mr. Biden wanted to clear this off his desk in an election year … it has been resolved.”

Julian Assange was living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2013 when he made failed bid for election to the Australian Senate as a candidate for the short-lived WiliLeaks Party.