WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been sentenced to time already served after pleading guilty in a remote US court to a single felony charge for publishing US military secrets.

His deal with US Justice Department prosecutors secures his freedom and concludes a drawn-out legal saga that raised divisive questions about press freedom and national security.

The plea was entered on Wednesday morning in federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth in the Pacific.

Assange was sentenced by the islands’ chief judge, Ramona Villagomez Manglona, about three hours later.

“Timing matters. If this case was brought before me some time near 2012, without the benefit of what I know now, that you served a period of imprisonment … in apparently one of the harshest facilities in the United Kingdom,” Manglona said.

“There’s another significant fact – the government has indicated there is no personal victim here. That tells me the dissemination of this information did not result in any known physical injury.”

Manglona said the 62 months Assange has already served in Britain’s high-security Belmarsh jail were “fair and reasonable and proportionate”.

“With this pronouncement it appears you will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man. I hope there will be some peace restored,” she said.

“Now there is some peace, you need to restore with yourself when you walk out and pursue your life as a free man.”

Assange had arrived at court shortly before the 9am hearing, wearing a dark suit with a tie loosened at the collar. He entered the building without taking questions.

It came just hours after he had landed on a chartered flight in the remote US territory, accompanied by a support team and Australia’s ambassador to Britain, Stephen Smith.

Assange was accompanied by Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd.

Inside the courthouse, he answered basic questions from Manglona and appeared to listen intently as terms of the deal were discussed.

Judge asked Assange what Assange did to constitute crime charged: “Working as a journalist I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information. I believe that the First Amendment protected that activity… “

— Thomas Mangloña II (@thomasreporting) June 26, 2024

As a condition of his plea, he will be required to destroy information that was provided to WikiLeaks.

The plea deal represents the latest and presumably final chapter in a court fight involving Assange.

The US Justice Department agreed to hold the hearing on the remote island because Assange opposed coming to the continental US and because it’s near Australia, where he will return after he enters his plea.

His chartered plane is expected to leave the island shortly after midday on Wednesday, bound for Canberra.

The guilty plea resolves a criminal case brought by the Trump administration Justice Department in connection with the receipt and publication of war logs and diplomatic cables that detailed US military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Prosecutors alleged that he conspired with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain the records and published them without regard to American national security, including by releasing the names of human sources who provided information to US forces.

Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.

The indictment was unsealed in 2019, but Assange’s legal woes long predated the criminal case and continued well past it.

Weeks after the release of the largest document cache in 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman’s allegation of rape and another’s allegation of molestation. Assange has long maintained his innocence, and the investigation was later dropped.

He presented himself in 2012 to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he claimed asylum on the grounds of political persecution. He spent seven years in self-exile there, hosting a parade of celebrity visitors and making periodic appearances from the building’s balcony to address supporters.

In 2019, his hosts revoked his asylum, allowing British police to arrest him.

He remained locked up for five years while US authorities sought to extradite him, in a process that encountered skepticism from British judges who worried about how Assange would be treated by the American criminal justice system.

Assange’s wife, Stella, told the BBC that she was “elated” at the plea deal as her husband flew on a chartered jet to Saipan. She said the preceding days had had been “touch-and-go” and “non-stop”, and that she was feeling “a whirlwind of emotions”.

“Julian walks out of Saipan federal court a free man. I can’t stop crying,” Stella Assange posted on X on Wednesday afternoon.

Stella and the couple’s two young sons, Gabriel and Max, flew to Australia on Sunday.

WikiLeaks says Assange was not permitted to fly commercially as part of his plea deal. He faces a $AUS500,000 ($752,000) bill for his charter flight home to Australia, via the Bangkok and the Northern Marianas Islands.

-with AAP