WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has reportedly struck a deal with the Biden administration to plead guilty to a felony charge stemming from...
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has reportedly struck a deal with the Biden administration to plead guilty to a felony charge stemming from his role in one of the largest breaches of classified U.S. government material in history.
The Biden Department of Justice will seek a 62-month prison sentence for Assange, the same amount of time that he was imprisoned in the U.K. while he fought extradition charges, CNN reported. The plea deal allows the five years that he has served in the U.K. to count as time served, thus allowing him to avoid spending time in a U.S. prison.
He would be allowed to return immediately to his home country of Australia, the report said.
Assange was indicted by a Virginia federal grand jury in 2019 on more than a dozen charges that alleged he illegally obtained and disseminated classified information about U.S. Military operations overseas. He faced more than 175 years in prison.
He will instead appear in U.S. federal court in the Mariana Islands, where he will plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act.
Prosecutors said that Assange recruited individuals to “hack into computers and/or illegally obtain and disclose classified information.”
His highest profile recruit, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, a man who claims that he is a woman and now goes by the name Chelsea, was convicted in 2010 for leaking hundreds of thousands of U.S. military records to WikiLeaks. Manning was sentenced to more than three decades behind bars but President Barack Obama commuted his sentence after only seven years.
Prosecutors say Assange conspired with Manning to steal and disseminate classified materials “up to the SECRET level”, a classification that signifies that unauthorized disclosure of the information “could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security.”
Rebeccah Heinrichs, senior fellow at Hudson Institute and the director of its Keystone Defense Initiative, slammed the Biden administration for its deal with Assange.
“We don’t know the extent of the damage Assange and Manning’s massive breach caused,” Heinrichs told The Daily Wire. “We do know they shared national secrets that jeopardized the lives of Afghans and Iraqis who were helping the U.S. military locate and destroy Taliban and Al Qaeda. Letting off Assange is another act of betrayal of those who aided the U.S. in destroying terrorists and it’s another blow to U.S. credibility and trustworthiness.”
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