As negotiations in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s long-running legal dispute with the United States reached a critical point this spring, prosecutors presented his lawyers with an option so crazy that those involved thought it sounded odd. Sounds like a Monty Python movie.
“Guam or Saipan?”
This is no joke. He was told that his path to freedom would pass through one of two American-controlled islands in the blue Pacific.
Assange, fearful of spending the rest of his life in the United States, has long insisted on a condition of any plea deal: that he never set foot in the country. In turn, the U.S. government asked Assange to plead guilty to a felony violation of the Espionage Act, which requires him to appear before a federal judge.
In April, a lawyer from the Justice Department’s national security division broke the impasse with a cunning workaround: What if the U.S. courtroom was not actually located within the continental United States?
Assange spent five years in a London prison, exhausted from spending 23 hours a day in his cell, and he quickly realized that this was the best treatment he had ever received. The parties settled on Saipan, an island in the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean, 6,000 miles from the west coast of the United States and about 2,200 miles from his native Australia.
The long and strange journey capped an even longer and stranger legal journey that began with Mr. Assange, an ambitious hacktivist who challenged the U.S. national security and political establishment, for He was praised and reviled for leaking state secrets in the United States.
They include information about U.S. military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as confidential cables shared between diplomats. During the 2016 presidential campaign, WikiLeaks published thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, humiliating the party and the Clinton campaign.
Yet the negotiations that led to Mr. Assange’s release were surprisingly amicable and efficient, as both sides acted out of a shared desire to end the impasse that has left Mr. Assange in limbo and the Justice Department ensnared, according to eight people. Protracted extradition fight.
The calendar is a major catalyst. By the end of 2023, senior Justice Department officials concluded that Mr. Assange, 52, was already serving a much longer sentence than many people who had committed similar crimes (as of 2023, he had been jailed for 62 months) .
Although Assange has been charged with 18 counts under the Espionage Act and faces up to hundreds of years in prison, if Assange is extradited, tried and convicted, he is likely to receive up to four sentences if sentenced concurrently. about years in prison.
Department officials’ rush to get rid of the troublesome and time-consuming case has made some Assange prosecutors targets of WikiLeaks supporters. One senior official said another factor in the negotiations was “Assange fatigue”.
Additionally, some of President Biden’s appointees were never fully satisfied with the Trump administration’s accusations that Assange’s activities skirted the line between espionage and legitimate disclosures in the public interest, current and former officials said. boundaries.
A Justice Department spokesman had no comment. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland told reporters on Thursday that the deal was in the “best interest” of the country.
By early 2024, Australian leaders, including Ambassador Kevin Rudd and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, began to pressure their American counterparts to reach a deal—not out of solidarity with Assange or out of concern for for his support.
“The Australian government has consistently said that Mr Assange’s case has dragged on for too long and that there will be no benefit in continuing to imprison him,” Albanese wrote on X on the day of his release. “We want him to be brought home to Australia.”
On April 11, the fifth anniversary of Assange’s imprisonment, President Biden told reporters at the White House that the United States was “considering” Australia’s request to send him back. Still, U.S. officials said the White House played no role in resolving the case.
Mr. Assange desperately wants to go home. His wife, Stella, told reporters that he had been facing health problems, and Assange had been candid about his severe depression for years. Even though he was in good health, spending nearly 14 years in London put a huge strain on him. He first lived in exile in the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid Swedish authorities investigating him for sexual assault, and later spent the next five years in Belmarsh Prison.
One of Assange’s lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, told an Australian television interviewer that she believed Australia’s pressure campaign, coupled with the recent positive ruling in Assange’s extradition case, led to negotiations with the Justice Department that began six months ago. A transformation has occurred.
Late last year, Assange’s Washington-based legal team, led by trial lawyer Barry Pollack, submitted a proposal in which Assange would plead guilty to misdemeanor charges on a website outside the United States and be sentenced to prison time.
Pollack also recommended that the government charge WikiLeaks, rather than its founder, with a felony for obtaining and disseminating sensitive intelligence documents that Assange obtained 15 years ago from former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
The proposal has attracted some prosecutors within the department who are eager to get off the ramp. But after brief internal discussions, senior officials rejected that approach and drafted a more serious counteroffer: Mr. Assange would face one felony count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate defense information and one more serious count. to plead guilty to crimes against him and Ms. Manning.
Free speech groups viewed the agreement as a setback for press freedom, but Mr. Assange did not appear to have any conceptual problem with pleading guilty to a felony on those grounds.
Instead, Robinson said in a television interview that his initial refusal to plead guilty was rooted in his reluctance to appear in court for fear of being detained indefinitely or physically assaulted in the United States.
She added that he made a “rational choice”.
In May, a London court ruled on narrow grounds that Assange could appeal his extradition to the United States. This decision gave him hope of eventual victory, but until then he remained in indefinite imprisonment.
Nick Varmos, former head of extradition at the Crown Prosecution Service, who prosecutes criminal cases in England and Wales, believes the ruling may have “triggered” an acceleration of plea deals.
But negotiations for Assange’s release appeared to be going well at the time. U.S. officials said the Justice Department proposed the Saipan plan before the ruling.
By June, all that was left was to arrange the complex legal and shipping logistics.
The Australian government provided $520,000 to charter a private jet to transport Assange from London to Saipan and then back home. His team is asking supporters on social media to crowdsource reimbursements.
Then there was the issue of coordinating his release with British authorities, who quietly held a bail hearing just days before he was scheduled to fly to freedom on June 24.
Assange also had a second ironclad demand, one that came into play near the end of the story: Whatever happened in Saipan, he intended to walk out of the courtroom a free man.
Justice Department officials believe there is little chance that the judge in the case, Ramona V. Manglona, will scuttle the deal. So, as part of early negotiations, they agreed to allow him to travel to Australia even if she rejected the deal.
This is not a problem. Judge Manglona accepted the deal without complaint and wished him “peace” and a happy birthday on July 3, when he will turn 53.
Assange made a final, modest protest within the limits of the terms of the agreement.
He told the court he believed he had been “working in his capacity as a journalist” when he interacted with Ms Manning, but took pains to add that he now admitted his conduct “broke” US law.
Matthew McKenzie, one of the lead prosecutors on the case, disagreed.
“We reject these views but acknowledge that he believes them,” he replied.
