WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Lands in Australia After US Guilty Plea

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange landed in Australia on Wednesday to an ecstatic welcome after pleading guilty to violating US espionage law in a deal that sets him free from a 14-year legal battle.
His arrival ends a saga in which Assange spent more than five years in a British high-security jail and seven years in asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London battling extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations and to the US, where he faced 18 criminal charges.
Those charges stemmed from WikiLeaks’ release in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – one of the largest breaches of secret information in US history.
During a three-hour hearing held earlier in the US territory of Saipan, Assange pleaded guilty to one criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defense documents but said he had believed the US Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects free speech, shielded his activities.
Chief US District Judge Ramona V. Manglona accepted his guilty plea, noting that the US government indicated there was no personal victim from Assange’s actions.
She wished Assange, who turns 53 on July 3, an early happy birthday as she released him due to time already served in a British jail.
While the US government viewed Assange as reckless for putting its agents at risk of harm by publishing their names, his supporters hailed him as a hero for promoting free speech and exposing war crimes.
He said WikiLeaks’ work would continue.
Assange’s UK and Australian lawyer Jennifer Robinson thanked the Australian government for securing Assange’s release. His father, John Shipton, told Reuters he was relieved.
“The beauty of the ordinary is the essence of life.”