By Steve Neavling
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has reached a deal with the Justice Department to end his lengthy legal troubles, allowing him to return to his home country of Australia.
Assange, who has spent more than a decade in self-exile and later a high-security prison in London, is expected to plead guilty to a felony charge of conspiring to obtain and distribute classified information, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The charges stem from WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables about U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s.
The plea is scheduled for Wednesday morning in Saipan, a U.S. territory in the western Pacific.
As part of the deal, Assange is expected to be sentenced to 62 months, with credit for the time he already served in England, which means he would be free to return to Australia.
“Politically he is in a much better position than he was six months ago,” Stella Assange, Julian Assange’s wife, told the WSJ last month. “As his wife and the mother of his children…I want him to be free.”
She said her husband had been living in a cell alone and was struggling with health issues.
