A supporter of Julian Assange protests in front of Westminster Magistrates Court in London, while calling for his release from Belmarsh Prison, on April 14.
Peter Nicholls/Getty Images
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has entered into a plea deal with the U.S. government, bringing an end to a years-long international saga over his handling of national security secrets.
Assange is preparing to plead guilty to a single count of conspiring to obtain and disclose information related to the national defense in a U.S. federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific, this week, according to newly filed court papers.
Under the terms of the agreement, Assange faces a sentence of 62 months, equivalent to the time he has already served at Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom while fighting extradition to the United States. He is expected to be released and to return to his home country of Australia following the court proceeding later this week.
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(and everyone loses a bit⌠now watch the trumpies shout that this is Biden being lax on crime even when it was trumpâs puppeter putin âGucciferâ from whom Assange got his intelligence dirt)
Bullshit. Someone went to military prison and then resisted again and went to prison again.
â In February 2019, Manning received a subpoena to testify in a U.S. government case proceeding under prosecutors in Virginia against Assange, the existence of which had been accidentally revealed in November 2018.[224] Manning objected to the secrecy of the grand jury proceedings and announced she would refuse to testify,[225] saying: âweâve seen this power abused countless times to target political speech. I have nothing to contribute to this case and I resent being forced to endanger myself by participating in this predatory practice.â[226] She added that she had provided all the information she had in 2013 during her court martial and that she stood by her previous answers.[227]
On March 8, 2019, Manning was found in contempt of court and jailed in the womenâs wing of a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia, with the judge conditioning her release on her testifying or the grand jury concluding its work.â
