WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves the United States Courthouse on June 26, 2024 in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands.
Chung Sung-jun | Getty Images News | Getty Images
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Wednesday walked free after pleading guilty in a U.S. court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific, to a felony charge for publishing U.S. military secrets.
The WikiLeaks organization posted a statement on the X social media platform saying that Assange was due to fly to his native Australia. The Australian administration of Anthony Albanese has pressed for Assange’s return.
“Regardless of the views that people have about Mr. Assange’s activities, the case has dragged on for too long. There’s nothing to be gained by his continues incarceration, and we want him brought home to Australia. And we have engaged and advocated Australia’s interests using all appropriate channels to support a positive outcome, and I’ve done that since very early on,” Albanese said in Parliament on Tuesday.
The 52-year-old Assange has been battling extradition for more than a decade. In that time, Assange has spent seven years in self-exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and the last five years at Belmarsh, a high-security prison on the outskirts of the U.K. capital.
Assange was wanted in the U.S. on 18 charges, including 17 under the Espionage Act and one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He did face up to 175 years in prison after WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of leaked confidential military files and diplomatic documents related to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
WikiLeaks gained international prominence in 2010, when the website released footage from a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack that killed two Reuters news staff and several others in Iraq’s capital, Baghdad.
It followed up this high-profile release by publishing hundreds of thousands of other classified files, making disclosures that often embarrassed Washington.
-CNBC’s Sam Meredith contributed to this article.