After five years in Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom and seven years before that confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Julian Assange has been released. The terms of the deal — guilty plea to one Espionage Act count for receiving and publishing classified national-defense information — left intact the legal theory the U.S. Department of Justice spent fourteen years building: that a journalist who publishes leaked government documents can be prosecuted as a spy.
The deal
The hearing took place on June 25, 2024 in a U.S. district courtroom in Saipan, capital of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands — a U.S. territory close enough to Australia for Assange to fly home the same day and remote enough that he never set foot on the continental United States. Under the deal he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to obtain and disclose national defense information under 18 U.S.C. § 793(g). He was sentenced to the 62 months he had already served in Belmarsh and immediately released. A government Air Force charter flew him to Canberra; his wife, Stella Moris Assange, and the Australian prime minister met him on the tarmac.
What the prosecution actually was
The 2010 WikiLeaks publications — the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary, "Collateral Murder," and the State Department diplomatic cables provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning — were the first time the United States government tried to prosecute a publisher under the Espionage Act for receiving and disclosing classified information. Every legacy U.S. newspaper that has touched a leak in the last century — the Pentagon Papers, the Snowden disclosures, the Drone Papers, the Panama Papers — has done what Assange was charged with doing. The Obama administration declined to bring charges in 2013 precisely because the DOJ could not draw a constitutional line between WikiLeaks and the New York Times. The first Trump administration brought them anyway.
What the plea preserves
The plea is a personal release. It is not a legal vindication, and the federal government did not abandon the theory that built the prosecution. The Espionage Act, in the U.S. government's official position, can be used against a publisher who receives and disseminates classified national-defense information. That theory is now sitting on the shelf for the next administration, the one after that, and the one after that, available the next time a U.S. publisher embarrasses the security state. Press-freedom groups — the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the ACLU, PEN America, Freedom of the Press Foundation — have been unanimous in describing the plea as both a relief (Assange is free) and an ongoing constitutional alarm (the theory survives).
Manning, the original prisoner
The case did not begin with Assange. It began with Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who in 2010 transmitted the underlying documents to WikiLeaks, was convicted of Espionage Act violations in 2013, sentenced to 35 years, and served seven before President Obama commuted her sentence in January 2017. Manning was returned to custody in 2019 over her refusal to testify before a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. She survived a suicide attempt in jail and was released after the grand jury's term expired. Her case and Assange's are one case, and any honest accounting of the Espionage Act's expansion in the post-September-11 era runs through both names.
What this closes
For Assange personally, the fourteen-year prosecution is over. The U.S. government is not coming for him again on these facts. For the broader question — whether U.S. publishers, including U.S. citizens reporting on U.S. classified material, can be prosecuted as spies — June 25, 2024 changed nothing. The case the Department of Justice built will be cited in the next prosecution and the one after. The plea bought Assange his freedom. It did not buy the next publisher anything at all.
