WikiLeaks founder Jullian Assange has pleaded guilty to a single charge of publishing US military secrets in a US court in the Northern Mariana Islands before being returned to his home country of Australia.
Assange had been imprisoned in Britain since 2019 and before that he lived for seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he applied for political asylum.
What has Julian Assange done?
Julian Assange founded the WikiLeaks website, which published thousands of confidential leaked documents from the US government, major companies and personal emails, among others.
A federal grand jury in Virginia sued Assange in 2019 on more than a dozen charges alleging that he illegally obtained classified information about the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and distributed it to WikiLeaks. Prosecutors accused him of recruiting individuals to “hack computers and/or illegally obtain and release classified information.”
The United States was to request Assange's extradition from Britain, and if convicted he could have faced up to 175 years in prison in the US.
What are some of Wikileaks' most important dumps?
Video of gunfire from a US helicopter killing civilians in Iraq
In 2010, WikiLeaks published video footage of a US helicopter attack in Baghdad. It showed, among other things, how Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant Saeed Chmagh were killed by American fire.
When a van arrived to pick up the wounded, the video also showed shots being fired at them.
On the recording of the attack, a voice could be heard saying, “Light them all.”
Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was later arrested for releasing the video along with other classified material about the war.
Documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of documents, many leaked by Manning, relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The documents contained evidence that dozens of civilians had been killed by the US in unreported incidents, and that Iraqi forces had tortured prisoners. They also include details about the hunt for Osama bin Laden and NATO's concerns about Pakistan and Iran potentially aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan.
At the time of their release in 2010, the Obama White House criticized the publication of the files and said they could endanger the lives of Americans and U.S. partners.
Emails from top Democrats
In 2016, WikiLeaks published about 20,000 Democratic National Committee emailsMany of these seemed to demonstrate bitterness toward Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders and favoritism toward Hillary Clinton. The leaked emails raised concerns that alienated Sanders supporters would not support Clinton once she won the nomination.
Then, about a month before the election, Wikileaks said it did 50,000 emails from the account of Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, and began releasing them in batches. WikiLeaks said it would release more emails every day until Election Day.
The emails covered a range of topics, including how to handle correspondence with President Obama on Hillary Clinton's private server when she was secretary of state, and advice from Jennifer Granholm, who served as governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2010, about how Clinton could get into trouble. “get out of the bubble” and talk to Americans.
One leaked email suggested that Democratic National Committee Chairman Donna Brazile had tipped off the Clinton campaign about a question ahead of a town hall.
Another email reportedly contained transcripts of Clinton's three Wall Street speeches to Goldman Sachs, although her campaign declined to confirm its authenticity. Primary opponent Bernie Sanders attacked her over the speeches and demanded she release the transcripts.
Whether the daily release of the Podesta emails affected the outcome of the 2016 campaign is difficult to say, because there were other explosive news stories that same month. On the first day WikiLeaks began publishing its trove of Podesta emails, an Access Hollywood tape was released that showed then-candidate Donald Trump disparagingly talking about women to Billy Bush. A few days before the election, the FBI revealed that it had found emails related to Clinton's tenure at the State Department on a laptop belonging to aide Huma Abedin's estranged husband, former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner.
In an interview with “FrontlineAbout a month after the election, Podesta later noted that there were no “earth-shattering revelations” in those thousands of emails. But there was, he said, a secondary effect: “It kind of destroys your ability to send a positive message.” It was the end of the campaign, and “I think what people want to hear about the future is,” he said. “But we were stuck in a cycle where the dominant reporting was either, again, something outrageous [Trump] had said or something they had leaked.”
