Julian Assange Pleads Guilty to One Charge of Espionage and Returns to Australia, Ending U.S. Attempts to Extradite Him

Appearing before a Northern Mariana Islands federal judge pursuant to a plea agreement,¹ WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pleaded guilty in June to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.² He was immediately sentenced to sixty-two months’ time served—the period he spent in a UK prison while contesting a U.S. extradition request³—and departed for Australia, his country of nationality.⁴ The quick proceeding brought an end to thirteen and a half years of efforts to prosecute Assange, first by Sweden for rape and sexual assault and then by the United States for encouraging and facilitating the largest disclosure of classified documents in U.S. history.⁵ The case's resolution avoided the possible rejection by the English courts of the U.S. request for Assange's extradition. It also prevented the consideration by U.S. courts of complicated statutory and constitutional questions that Assange's prosecution would have raised regarding the relationship between national security and the First Amendment. Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the plea deal was in the “best interests” of the United States.⁶

According to the Department of Justice, beginning in 2009, “Assange actively solicited and recruited people who had access, authorized or otherwise, to classified information and were willing to provide that information to him and WikiLeaks.”⁷ In 2010, “in the course of the conspiracy with Assange,” Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning), a U.S. army intelligence analyst, “download[ed] hundreds of thousands of documents and reports, many of them classified at the SECRET level.”⁸ The downloaded files amounted to “four nearly complete U.S. government databases” that contained significant activity reports pertaining to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, detainee assessment briefs from Guantánamo Bay, and a quarter million State Department cables.⁹ Manning sent these documents to Assange, who disclosed a significant proportion of them through the Wikileaks website in 2010 and 2011.¹⁰ The Justice Department emphasized that Assange's “decision to reveal the names of human sources illegally shared with him by Manning created a grave and imminent risk to human life.”¹¹

In August 2010, while visiting Stockholm, Assange allegedly committed rape, sexual molestation, and illegal coercion. A Swedish court issued an arrest warrant that November on those charges, and a European arrest warrant (EAW) soon followed. He was arrested the following month in London but was granted bail while he contested the validity of the EAW. Those challenges culminated in a May 2012 UK Supreme Court judgment dismissing Assange's appeal of a judge's order upholding the EAW.¹² Weeks later, while still out on bail, Assange entered the Ecuadorean embassy and requested political asylum,¹³ which was granted two months later.¹⁴ Assange feared that if he were surrendered to Sweden, the authorities there would subsequently extradite him to the United States.¹⁵ Refusing to recognize the status bestowed on Assange by Ecuador, the United Kingdom denied him safe passage out of the country, stating that the it had a “binding obligation to extradite him to Sweden . . . [and Ecuador's grant of asylum did] not change that in any way.”¹⁶ Assange therefore remained in the embassy, and with neither side budging, there he remained. In May 2017, following the running of the statute of limitations on three of the charges against him, and with the chances of his surrender on the fourth charge (rape) unlikely, the Swedish prosecutor discontinued her investigation and withdrew the EAW.¹⁷ Assange, though, decided to stay holed up at the embassy, now fearing arrest and extradition to the United States if he left the premises.¹⁸

Indeed, in December 2017, the United States requested Assange's provisional arrest pursuant to the U.S.-UK extradition treaty following the issuance of a federal criminal complaint alleging violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.¹⁹ Obama administration officials had decided not to prosecute Assange because doing so would be similar to charging a journalist for publishing classified information.²⁰ New Justice Department leadership under President Donald J. Trump adopted a different policy.²¹ Upon receiving the U.S. request, the Westminster Magistrates’ Court (which handles all first instance extradition matters in England and Wales) quickly issued a warrant. Because Assange was still at the embassy, the federal complaint, the Magistrates’ Court warrant, and a subsequent federal indictment²² were all issued under seal. But the existence of the indictment and the United States' intention to seek Assange's extradition were inadvertently disclosed in a court filing in another case and became public knowledge.²³

In April 2019, Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno, desiring better relations with the United States,²⁴ reversed his predecessor's decision and revoked Assange's asylum.²⁵ British police entered the embassy with Ecuador's permission and arrested Assange on a British warrant issued years earlier when he violated his bail by not surrendering for his Swedish extradition.²⁶ At the same time, he was arrested on the warrant that was issued pursuant to the U.S. provisional arrest request.²⁷ Assange was quickly convicted on the bail charge and sentenced to fifty weeks’ imprisonment.²⁸ He remained in jail following the completion of the custodial portion of that sentence pending the resolution of proceedings related to the U.S. extradition request, which had been formally submitted following his removal from the embassy.²⁹ The extradition request incorporated charges under the Espionage Act that were added in a superseding indictment filed in May 2019.³⁰

In January 2021, after a delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a district judge ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the United States because he would commit suicide if he were imprisoned at Administrative Maximum Security prison, Florence (ADX Florence) or subjected to special administrative measures (SAMs).³¹ The United States soon provided assurances that Assange would not be imprisoned at that facility, would not be subjected to SAMs, and would be transferred to Australia to serve his sentence if convicted. The High Court granted the United States' appeal in December 2021,³² and the secretary of state ordered Assange's extradition in June 2022.³³ Assange appealed the extradition order,³⁴ and in March 2024, the High Court decided that it was arguable (the standard for deciding whether to grant leave to appeal) that there would be a violation of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (freedom of expression) and 81(b) of the Extradition Act 2003 (prejudice by reason of nationality) if Assange were “not permitted to rely on the First Amendment” at trial.³⁵ The High Court gave the United States three weeks to file new assurances that would address these issues.³⁶

The United States submitted an assurance that the death penalty would not be sought in the case, but not an assurance that Assange would, as a non-citizen, have a defense based on the First Amendment.³⁷ The U.S. assurance provided only that Assange would “have the ability to raise and seek to rely upon [the First Amendment] at trial” but added that a “decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the U.S. courts.”³⁸ The attorney representing the United States stated that the issue was not relevant since the First Amendment would not apply, under the facts of the case, even to U.S. citizens: “The position of the US prosecutor is that no one, neither US citizens nor foreign citizens, are entitled to rely on the [F]irst [A]mendment in relation to publication of illegally obtained national defence information giving the names of innocent sources to their grave and imminent risk of harm.”³⁹ The High Court in May found the First Amendment assurance filed by the United States “unsatisfactory” and granted Assange leave to appeal the secretary of state's decision.⁴⁰ The court set dates for a July hearing.⁴¹

The hearing would never take place. Negotiations between Assange's attorneys and the Justice Department had begun months earlier. U.S. prosecutors had concluded that Assange had already been imprisoned for a period longer than what others had served in similar circumstances.⁴² Reportedly, as well, “some officials appointed under President Biden were never entirely comfortable with the Trump administration's decision to charge Mr. Assange with activities that skirted the line between espionage and legitimate disclosures made in the public interest.”⁴³ The Australian government had also been lobbying for a deal,⁴⁴ with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stating that “Mr. Assange's . . . case has dragged on for too long . . . [and] [t]here is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration.”⁴⁵ These factors, combined with the possibility that the extradition order would be quashed by the English courts, created the conditions that led to the plea bargain. With Assange reluctant to enter the United States, a federal court in a U.S. territory located thousands of miles from the continental United States, was chosen as a compromise venue, and Assange was granted conditional bail to travel the more than seven thousand miles to enter his plea.⁴⁶ The prosecution over, the extradition request was withdrawn, and the English judicial proceedings were discontinued.⁴⁷

Following the judge's acceptance of Assange's guilty plea, State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller commented: “it is important, when we talk about Julian Assange, to remind the world that the actions for which he was indicted and for which he has now pled guilty are actions that put the lives of our partners, our allies, and our diplomats at risk, especially those who work in dangerous places like Afghanistan and Iraq.”⁴⁸

Human rights organizations, which had for years called for the United States to drop its efforts to extradite and prosecute Assange,⁴⁹ welcomed his release but expressed concern regarding the plea agreement's implications. The American Civil Liberties Union stated that “[e]xposing government secrets and revealing them in the public interest is the core function of national security journalism. Today, for the first time, that activity was described in a guilty plea as a criminal conspiracy. . . . The precedent set by this guilty plea would have been far more dangerous had it been ratified by federal courts. But make no mistake, the vital work of national security journalists will be more difficult today than it was yesterday.”⁵⁰ Amnesty International asserted that the United States “sent a clear message across the US and abroad: publishers and journalists could end up behind bars on espionage charges for years if they use classified material to expose human rights violations.”⁵¹ “The fight for global media freedom continues,” Amnesty continued, and “[w]ork must be done to uphold freedom of expression and to unwind the impact of the ‘chilling effect’ that Assange's treatment has had on media freedom worldwide.”⁵²