When negotiations to end the long legal battle between Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and the United States reached a critical point this spring, prosecutors presented his lawyers with a decision so crazy that one person involved thought it sounded like a line from a Monty Python movie.
“Guam or Saipan?”
It wasn’t a joke. His path to freedom, he was told, would lead through one of two American-controlled islands in the blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
Mr. Assange, who feared he would be imprisoned in the United States for the rest of his life, had long insisted on one condition of any deal: that he would never set foot in the country. The US government, in turn, had required Mr. Assange to plead guilty to a felony for violating the Espionage Act, which required him to appear before a federal judge.
In April, a lawyer from the Justice Department’s National Security Division solved the impasse with a clever workaround: How about an American courtroom that wasn’t actually on the US mainland?
Mr. Assange, exhausted from five years in a London prison during which he spent 23 hours a day in his cell, quickly realized that the deal was the best he had ever been offered. The two sides settled on Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific, 6,000 miles from the west coast of the United States and about 2,200 miles from his native Australia.
That long, strange journey capped an even longer, stranger legal journey that began after Mr. Assange – an ambitious hacker activist who took on national security and the US political establishment – was alternately celebrated and reviled for leaking state secrets in the USA in the 2010s.
This included material about American military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as confidential cables exchanged among diplomats. During the 2016 presidential campaign, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, leading to revelations that embarrassed the party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Still, the negotiations that led to Mr. Assange’s release were surprisingly amicable and efficient, with both sides acting out of a mutual desire to end a stalemate that had kept Mr. Assange in limbo and embroiled the ministry in a protracted extradition battle , report eight people who are familiar with the lectures.
The calendar was an important catalyst. By the end of 2023, senior Justice Department officials concluded that Mr. Assange, now 52, had already served a significantly longer sentence than many people convicted of similar crimes (at that point he had already served 62 months). his release).
Although he had been charged under the Espionage Act on 18 counts and faced hundreds of years in prison, if his sentences had been run concurrently, Mr Assange would most likely have been sentenced to around four years in prison if extradited, tried and convicted , his legal team calculated in a court filing.
Department officials were eager to get rid of the burdensome and time-consuming case that had made some Assange prosecutors a target of WikiLeaks supporters. A senior official said another factor in the negotiations was “Assange fatigue.”
In addition, some officials appointed under President Biden were never entirely satisfied with the Trump administration’s decision to charge Mr. Assange with activities that bordered on espionage and legitimate public interest disclosures, current and former officials said.
A Justice Department spokeswoman had no comment. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland told reporters Thursday that the deal serves the country’s “best interests.”
In early 2024, leaders in Australia, including Kevin Rudd, the ambassador to the United States, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, began pressuring their American counterparts to reach an agreement – not so much in solidarity with Mr Assange or support for Assange actions, but because he had spent so much time in captivity.
“The Australian government has repeatedly stated that Mr Assange’s case has dragged on for too long and that his continued detention will achieve nothing,” Mr Albanese wrote on X on the day of his release. “We want him returned to Australia. “
On April 11, the fifth anniversary of Mr. Assange’s imprisonment, President Biden told reporters at the White House that the United States was “considering” Australia’s request to be repatriated. Still, U.S. officials said the White House played no role in solving the case.
Mr Assange was desperate to go home. He has had health problems, his wife Stella told reporters, and Mr. Assange has spoken openly about his bouts of severe depression over the years. Even if he had been in the best of health, the toll of spending almost 14 years in London would have been an enormous burden. He initially lived as an exile in the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid Swedish authorities investigating him for sexual assault, and spent the following five years in Belmarsh Prison.
One of Mr Assange’s lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, told an Australian television interviewer she believed the Australian pressure campaign, coupled with a positive recent ruling in his extradition case, had led to a postponement of talks with the Justice Department that began six months ago.
Late last year, Mr. Assange’s Washington-based legal team, led by trial attorney Barry Pollack, put forward proposals in which Mr. Assange would plead guilty to a misdemeanor from outside the United States and be sentenced to prison.
Mr. Pollack also suggested that the government charge WikiLeaks, rather than its founder, with a crime over its procurement and dissemination of sensitive intelligence documents that Mr. Assange received 15 years ago from Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst.
The offer appealed to some prosectors within the department who wanted an exit ramp. But after a brief period of internal discussions, senior officials rejected that approach and drafted a slightly tougher counteroffer: Mr. Assange would plead to a single crime of conspiring to obtain and disseminate national defense information, a more serious offense involving his interactions including Ms. Manning.
Free speech groups believe the agreement represents a setback for press freedom, but Mr. Assange seemed conceptually comfortable with admitting to a crime on these grounds.
Instead, his initial refusal to plead guilty to a crime was due to his reluctance to appear in an American courtroom for fear of being indefinitely detained or physically attacked in the United States, Ms. Robinson said in the television interview.
He made “a rational decision,” she added.
In May, a court in London narrowly ruled that Mr. Assange could appeal his extradition to the United States. This decision promised him a final victory, but left him imprisoned indefinitely until then.
Nick Vamos, the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s extradition department, which is responsible for bringing criminal cases in England and Wales, believes the verdict may have “triggered” an acceleration of plea bargaining.
But negotiations for Mr Assange’s release appear to have progressed well by then. The Justice Department released its Saipan plan ahead of the ruling, U.S. officials said.
All that remained to be organized by June was the complex legal and transport logistics.
The Australian government provided the $520,000 needed to charter a private jet to take Mr Assange from London to Saipan and then back home. His team is appealing to supporters on social media to crowdsource the reimbursement.
Then it was a matter of coordinating his release with the British authorities, who had quietly called a bail hearing just days before he was scheduled to fly to freedom on June 24.
Mr. Assange had a second ironclad demand that came into play as the saga neared its end: No matter what happened in Saipan, he planned to walk out of court a free man.
Justice Department officials saw little chance that the judge in the case, Ramona V. Manglona, would scuttle the deal. Therefore, as part of previous negotiations, they had agreed to allow him to leave for Australia, even if Australia rejected the agreement.
It wasn’t a problem. Judge Manglona accepted the deal without complaint and wished him “peace” and a happy birthday on July 3, when he turns 53.
Mr Assange made a modest final protest – within the constraints imposed on him by the terms of the contract.
He told the court that he had assumed he was “working as a journalist” when interacting with Ms Manning – but added that he now accepted his actions “constituted a breach” of US law.
Matthew McKenzie, one of the lead prosecutors in the case, agreed to disagree.
“We reject those feelings but accept that he believes them,” he replied.
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2024-06-29 13:03:45
www.nytimes.com
