International attention descends on CNMI federal court, where Julian Assange will appear tomorrow

Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder notorious for having published top secret, secret, and confidential U.S. military and other national security records, including diplomatic cables, will appear before the U.S. District Court of the Northern Mariana Islands Wednesday at 9 a.m. to plead guilty to four counts of federal crimes, according to a filing by Matthew McKenzie, Justice Department deputy chief for Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, National Security Division.

The letter to Chief Judge Ramona Manglona, dated June 24 eastern standard time, was co-signed by Shawn Anderson, United States Attorney for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. The docket in Saipan’s federal court related to the Assange case is sealed, however Mr. Anderson’s office provided media throughout the Marianas with the McKenzie-Anderson letter and the information filed against Mr. Assange.

According to the information, Mr. Assange is alleged to have conspired with Chelsea Manning between “[f]rom at least 2009 and continuing through at least 2011,” obtained and published national defense information in violation of 18 U.S.C. §793(g).

Ms. Manning, who was convicted in July 2013 by court-martial for her part in the conspiracy and spent seven years in prison before President Obama commuted her sentence, was an army intelligence officer in Iraq in 2009. She had access to classified databases, according to several international news stories on the matter. According to these stories, among the information leaked to Mr. Assange, who published the classified information, were footage of a July 2007 airstrike on Baghdad, a 2009 airstrike in Afghanistan, 251,287 diplomatic cables, and 482,832 Army reports that became known as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary.

According to reports, the Iraq War Log led to the discovery that the U.S. government had not accounted for 15,000 civilian deaths during the war in Iraq. The leaks also revealed that the U.S. government had classified the deaths of two Reuters journalists as “enemy killed in action.”

According to Wikipedia, Wikileaks provided the Afghan War Diary to The Guardian, the New York Times, and Der Spiegel. “The New York Times described the leak as ‘a six-year archive of classified military documents [that] offers an unvarnished and grim picture of the Afghan war,'” according to the Wikipedia entry.

The publication of the top secret, secret, and confidential military documents led Mr. Assange to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he stayed until 2019, when a government dispute in Ecuador led to his asylum being revoked. He was apprehended and jailed by the British government pending extradition to face several indictments filed against him in U.S. courts through the period of the controversy. These charges included violations of the Espionage Act of 1917.

According to international reports today, the Justice Department and Mr. Assange have agreed to a plea deal, where tomorrow Mr. Assange will plead guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for his freedom.

According to the McKenzie-Anderson letter, the reason the Justice Department has chosen the CNMI federal court as the place where Mr. Assange will be brought to face federal charges is its proximity to his native Australia. He is expected to be sentenced the same day as his plea hearing, according to the letter.

You may view both the letter and the information below: