Julian Assange plea deal criticised, celebrated by US political world

But other Republicans, such as Congressman Tom Massie – who invited Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton as his special guest to Biden’s State of the Union address in March – said Assange’s “liberation is great news”.

“It’s a travesty that he’s already spent so much time in jail,” he added. “Obama, Trump, & Biden should have never pursued this prosecution.”

Robert F Kennedy jnr, who is running as an independent presidential candidate against Trump and Biden agreed.

He said he was “overjoyed” and described Assange as a “generational hero” but wrote on X: “the bad news is that he had to plea guilty to conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence info. Which means the US security state succeeded in criminalising journalism and extending their jurisdiction globally to non-citizens.”

The now 52-year-old Assange spent seven years hiding away in the Ecuadorian Embassy in central London, and a further five years in the high-security Belmarsh prison after WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and diplomatic cables leaked by former US military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning – the largest security breach of its kind in US military history.

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Assange was indicted during the Trump administration and faced 18 charges carrying a total sentence of up to 175 years.

Under the new deal, he is expected to plead guilty to one single Espionage Act charge of “conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defence of the United States.”

In turn, he will finally be able to return to Australia.

The development follows lobbying by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who raised Assange’s case in meetings with US President Joe Biden, and by Australian politicians from across the aisle.

Meanwhile, in the US Congress, Republican Congressman Massie and Democrat Congressman Jim McGovern led a group of 16 members of Congress who wrote to Biden in November, urging him to halt all prosecution proceedings against Assange and warning that “should the US extradition and prosecution go forward, there is a significant risk that our bilateral relationship with Australia will be badly damaged”.

The politicians – who ranged from progressive Democrats such as Rashida Tlaib to far-right Trump allies such as Marjorie Taylor Green – had also told Biden: “the United States must not pursue an unnecessary prosecution that risks criminalising common journalistic practices and thus chilling the work of the free press”.

The issue gained further bipartisan support last month, when Trump was asked during an interview ahead of the Libertarian National Convention if he would pardon Assange if he returned to office.

“Well I’m going to talk about that today, and we’re going to give it very serious consideration,” he told podcaster Tim Pool – although he did not end up raising Assange at all during his speech.

The details of the plea deal were outlined in a justice department letter to Judge Ramona Manglona of the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, which will oversee the hearing and sentencing proceedings.

“We appreciate the Court accommodating these plea and sentencing proceedings on a single day at the joint request of the parties, in light of the defendant’s opposition to travelling to the continental United States to enter his guilty plea and the proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of the proceedings,” the letter says.