WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty to U.S. criminal charges as part of a deal that would allow him to be released, court documents show.
Assange, 52, is charged with conspiring to obtain and leak defense information.
For years, the United States has considered the WikiLeaks documents – which revealed information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – to be life-threatening.
He has spent the past five years in a British prison where he has been fighting extradition to the United States.
According to BBC US partner CBS, Assange will not be imprisoned in the US and will be given time served in the UK.
Assange will return to Australia, according to a letter from the Department of Justice.
The agreement is expected to be completed on Wednesday, June 26, in a Northern Mariana Islands court, where he will plead guilty to one charge.
The remote Pacific island is a commonwealth of the United States, closer to Australia than Hawaii or the U.S. federal courts on the mainland.
Agence France-Presse quoted an Australian government spokesman as saying that the case “has taken too long.”
His attorney, Richard Miller, declined to comment when contacted by CBS. The BBC has also contacted his lawyers in the US.
He and his lawyers have long claimed that the case against him is politically motivated.
In April this year, U.S. President Biden said he was considering Australia’s request to drop the prosecution of Assange.
In a victory the following month, the UK High Court ruled that Assange could launch a new appeal against extradition to the US, allowing him to challenge how his future trial in the US would proceed and whether his right to free speech would be Warranty against infringement.
After the ruling, his wife, Stella, told reporters and supporters that the Biden administration “should distance itself from this disgraceful prosecution.”
U.S. prosecutors originally wanted to put the WikiLeaks founder on trial on 18 counts, mainly under the Espionage Act, related to leaking classified U.S. military records and diplomatic information related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
WikiLeaks, founded by Assange in 2006, claimed to have released more than 10 million documents, which the U.S. government later called “one of the largest leaks of classified information in U.S. history.”
In 2010, the website released a video of a US military helicopter killing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad.
One of Assange’s most prominent collaborators, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, was sentenced to 35 years in prison before then-President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.
Assange also faces separate charges of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, which he denies.
He spent seven years hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, claiming the Swedish case would result in his being sent to the United States.
Swedish authorities dropped the case in 2019, saying too much time had passed since the original complaint, but British authorities later detained him. He was put on trial for not surrendering to court and was extradited to Sweden.
Even amid his long legal battle, Assange has rarely been seen in public and has reportedly suffered from poor health over the years, including suffering a minor stroke in prison in 2021.
