Stella Assange, Julian’s wife who is also the WikiLeaks founder said to Reuters on Tuesday that they would seek a pardon for him after he agreed to plead guilty to violating US espionage law, thus bringing his long-running legal saga in Britain to an end.
Assange will admit guilt in one count of the criminal conspiracy to obtain and reveal classified US national defense documents and expectedly sentenced at a hearing in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands for 62 months already served.
Afterwards he will be free to return home to Australia.
The move elated Stella Assange, a lawyer who has been with him since almost the beginning of this legal battle. However, she was mad over his detention for such a long time.
They got married when he was imprisoned in Belmarsh maximum security jail in London and had two children while confined in Ecuadorian embassy in London.
She maintained that they are going to ask for pardon because admitting one’s guilt on an espionage charge is really “very serious concern” for journos all across the globe. In addition she indicated that they would start up a fund raising drive as going from London through Saipan before getting back home would cost approximately five hundred thousand dollars.
“The fact that there is a guilty plea under the Espionage Act in relation to obtaining and disclosing National Defence information is obviously a very serious concern for journalists and national security journalists in general,” she said.
According to her, Stella Assange has harbored this kind of belief from as far as memory could serve her but until Wednesday comes when it should happen-when he arrives safe and sound in Australia-she’ll never have peace within herself. As of Tuesday morning, their children still remain oblivious about it all.
“I feel elated. I also feel worried you know because I’m so used to this anything could happen. I’m worried that until it’s fully signed off, I worry but it looks like we’ve got there,” she said from Sydney.
“I’ll really believe it when I have him in front of me and I can take him and hug him and then it will be real you know?”
This marks the end of a legal saga that has seen Stella Assange spend more than five years in a British high-security jail and seven holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London following WikiLeaks’ mass release of secret US documents – the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history.
Getting closer to agreement, Stella mentioned Julian having been a “so much lighter” by now that they will most probably spend some time together somewhere in Australia – she thinks it is a good place to get well again.
“And I actually think that goes not just for Julian but for me as well,” she stated. “I mean it’s been a rough, very rough few years and we need some time.”
But first they needed to get money.
“Australian policy is he has to pay his own return flight so he’s had to charter a flight and so he will basically be in debt when he lands in Canberra.
In a bid to secure the funds necessary for reimbursement of his freedom flight from the Australian government, we will set up an emergency account.
“It’s five hundred thousand US dollars”
