Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the US Justice Department that will allow him to walk free and resolve a long-running legal saga that has centred on the publication of a trove of classified documents.

Mr Assange left HMP Belmarsh prison on Monday and will appear in a US federal court on Wednesday at 9am local time (Tuesday 11pm, GMT) in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. 

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

The guilty plea, which must be approved by a judge, brings an abrupt conclusion to a criminal case of international intrigue and to the US government’s years-long pursuit of a publisher whose hugely popular secret-sharing website made him a cause célèbre among many press freedom advocates.

He is expected to return to Australia after his plea and sentencing.

Who is Julian Assange and what is WikiLeaks?

Julian Assange, 52, is the founder of WikiLeaks, a non-profit organisation set up in 2006 to publish classified information from anonymous sources. It claims to be a platform for whistleblowers and to have published more than 10 million files. 

Mr Assange became a skilled hacker during his teenage years and by 1996 - aged 25 - he had pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking and related crimes in Australia, being fined $2,100. 

He has described WikiLeaks as “a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents”. 

Where is Julian Assange from?

Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland in 1971, but moved often, living in more than 30 Australian towns and cities over the course of his childhood. 

What is Assange and WikiLeaks accused of? 

WikiLeaks in 2010 released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history - along with swaths of diplomatic cables.

Mr Assange was indicted during Donald Trump’s administration over the mass release of the documents, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

The United States initially brought 18 charges against Mr Assange in 2018, including 17 charges related to obtaining and disclosing US defence information and one charge of conspiring with Ms Manning to hack a government system. 

However the US Justice Department has agreed to drop 18 espionage charges against him – instead charging him only with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information.

What will the plea deal require?

Under the terms of the deal, the Mr Assange will be sentenced to 62 months in prison, but the five years he has already spent incarcerated in HMP Belmarsh in the UK will count against that period. 

The agreement must be approved by a federal judge before it can take effect.

What information did Julian Assange allegedly release?

WikiLeaks has released, among other things, footage from a US military helicopter showing civilians being killed in Baghdad in Iraq, documents relating to the unreported killing of civilians by US military in Afghanistan and a manual for operations at Guantanamo Bay. 

It also shared US State Department diplomatic cables in 2010 and files which documented alleged spying by the US on European politicians, including Angela Merkel.

In 2016, WikiLeaks shared emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the campaign manager of Hillary Clinton, which damaged Clinton’s run for president. 

The US claimed that the leaked emails were hacked by Russia, which WikiLeaks denies. The group has been criticised over its alleged ties to Moscow.

The US government also claimed Mr Assange helped Osama bin Laden hunt American informants in the Middle East by publishing classified documents online, with prosecutors saying documents made public by WikiLeaks had been recovered at Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound.

The US claimed that a New York Times article in 2010 proves that the Taliban was using information it found on the WikiLeaks website. 

The Americans also claimed that informants allegedly named by WikiLeaks have since “disappeared”.

How did he avoid extradition to the US?

Mr Assange evaded extradition by taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy from 2012 to 2019. 

In 2010, a warrant had been issued for his arrest by Sweden over allegations of sexual assault, which Mr Assange denied, claiming they were a pretext to extradite him to the US. He gave himself up to British police but was released on bail within 10 days. 

After unsuccessfully challenging the extradition proceedings, Mr Assange breached his £340,000 bail in June 2012 to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. 

However, in 2019, his political asylum status was withdrawn following a disagreement with the Ecuadorian authorities and he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for breach of bail conditions. 

Then in 2021, a judge ruled that Mr Assange’s detention should continue on the “substantial grounds” that he might abscond from future appeal hearings.

The US government then unsealed their own indictments against Mr Assange, and his extradition to the US was contested in the British courts. 

The Swedish investigation against Mr Assange was also dropped. 

What was his defence?

During Mr Assange’s 2020 extradition hearing, his lawyers argued that the prosecution “is not motivated by genuine concern for criminal justice but by politics”. 

They also argued that the case was part of a wider assault on free speech by Donald Trump’s administration and that the US wanted to make an example of the WikiLeaks founder.

Mr Assange claimed that WikiLeaks only published the unredacted material pertaining to the names of informants “after they had been published by others who have never faced prosecution”. 

He also denied helping Ms Manning in accessing the leaked documents. As such, his defence team argued that the US case “fundamentally misrepresents the facts in order to bring this case within the bounds of an extradition crime”.

His team also contended that the extradition would be an abuse of process because extradition for a political offence is “expressly prohibited” by Article 4(1) of the Anglo-US Extradition Treaty.

Who supports Assange?

Supporters of Mr Assange included Dame Vivienne Westwood, who prior to her death protested outside the court on the first day of the extradition hearing in 2020; Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador; and Pamela Anderson, the ex-Baywatch actress. 

He has also been praised by Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek economist, and John McDonnell, who said the Assange case was “the Dreyfus case of our age”. 

Dunja Mijatovic, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, also criticised Mr Assange’s extradition.

Organisations and civil liberties groups including Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders offered support to Mr Assange too, arguing the charges threaten the freedom of the press.

What is the Russia connection?

Mr Assange’s barrister claimed during his 2020 extradition hearing that his client had been offered “a pre-emptive pardon” in exchange for helping Donald Trump find the source of the DNC leaks, known as “the Russia investigation”.

Mr Assange claimed in Feb 2020 that Trump offered him a pardon if he denied Russian involvement in the hacking of the DNC emails.

What happened inside the embassy?

Mr Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over sex offence allegations, which he denied and were later dropped. 

During his time in the embassy, his supporters claimed he was subject to intimidation, threats and a breach of his human rights. 

During his initial extradition hearing, an unnamed witness said the US was holding “conversations about whether there should be more extreme measures contemplated, such as kidnapping or poisoning Julian Assange in the embassy”.

Mr Assange also claimed that he and his lawyers were secretly filmed at the embassy and that this information was passed to the Americans. He also claimed he was subject to constant surveillance and took to sleeping in a tent to retain some privacy. 

In December 2017, the owner of UC Global, a Spanish company contracted by the Ecuadorian Government to provide security at the embassy, allegedly directed an employee to steal the used nappy of a baby who sometimes accompanied its mother when she visited Mr Assange. 

The owner, David Morales, said in a court hearing in Spain that the theft was necessary to DNA test faecal matter to establish if the child was Mr Assange’s. 

The WikiLeaks founder has claimed that this may have been part of an attempt to blackmail him.