Julian Assange, the whistleblowing founder of Wikileaks, has been released from prison as part of a plea deal with the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

• Assange—who many hail as a hero for shining a light on military wrongdoing, government corruption, and human rights abuses—has spent more than a decade fighting extradition or being held in an English prison. He faced charges of “conspiracy to obtain and disclose US national defense information.”

• The DOJ said he is scheduled to appear in federal court in the Mariana Islands—a US commonwealth in the Western Pacific—on Wednesday morning, where he pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.

• The deal would allow Assange to avoid imprisonment in the United States. Federal prosecutors are seeking only a 62-month sentence, which correlates to the same time he had already spent fighting extradition in Belmarsh, a prison in London.

• Once approved, the plea deal would credit Assange with time served and allow him to return to his native Australia.

BREAKING: WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange boards a plane after being released from prisonpic.twitter.com/7XuCBYkLat

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) June 25, 2024

The conversation: Many on social media remarked on Assange’s historic release. For years, he has faced political repression for his journalistic endeavors.

• “Julian Assange has reportedly agreed to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act, in exchange for release from prison. Just a reminder: “possessing or accessing” material related to the “national defense” of the USA is something that the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, CNN, etc. do every day,” said Journalist Michael Tracey on X/Twitter.
• Now that Assange is free. Let’s remember the real reason he was hunted. He lifted the veil on the military industrial complex. Radicalising an entire generation against the forever wars. Let that be his legacy,” said political podcaster Clint Russell, also on X/Twitter.

• “Julian Assange is a hero for the ages. What he endured for all of us is unimaginable. This is him boarding the plane at Stansted yesterday. Savour this moment,” said Matt Kennard, investigative journalist for DeclassifiedUK.

Although he obviously had every right to secure his own release after so many years of totally unjustified captivity, Assange’s guilty plea unfortunately sets a really bad precedent for press freedom and civil liberties writ large. “Accessing” or “possessing” so-called “national…

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 25, 2024

Legacy of journalism: Assange’s Wikileaks is said to be responsible for the release of over ten million classified documents in the name of fair and transparent government.

• In 2010, Wikileaks enraged Washington after it released thousands of classified US documents pertaining to America’s lengthy war in Iraq. Known as the “Iraq War logs,” the data was a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports from the Iraq War covering from 2004 to 2009.

• In 2012, Wikileaks unveiled the inner workings of the United States’ infamous Guantanamo Bay prison camp, which included more than 700 files on prisoner information and torture directives.

• In 2013, Wikileaks published the “Kissinger Cables,” a trove of more than 1.7 million classified US diplomatic and intelligence documents from the 1970s. The information was released as Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, England.

• In 2016, Assange faced challenges after he released roughly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails, which purported to show anti-Bernie Sanders bias and favoritism toward Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. A month before the election, Wikileaks began releasing 50,000 emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, which revealed alleged corruption and dirty secrets.

Have a story? Please forward any tips or leads to the editors at [email protected]