Assange’s $750,000 bill to avoid landing on US mainland

The WikiLeaks founder will have to pay a huge amount of money in order to give a private jet so he could dodge the continental US.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange shelled out around three quarters of a million dollars to fly to a remote island to avoid returning to the American mainland after accepting a plea deal with the US government and being freed from prison.

Assange, 52, was freed on Monday morning from a London prison and flew from the city’s Stansted Airport to the US territory of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands — a $A750,000 flight, reported The New York Post.

He will have a US federal court hearing there Wednesday morning on the island which is remote from the US but relatively close to Australia.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stepping off his flight from London upon arriving in Bangkok for a layover in the Thai capital. (Photo by WikiLeaks / WikiLeaks / AFP).

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In a Saipan courthouse, he will plead guilty to conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information for releasing classified reports on the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on his WikiLeaks website, the US Justice Department said in the court documents filed on Monday.

Assange reportedly refused to set foot on an major US landmass, The Sun reported.

The American territory is only about 3000km from Australia, compared to the 11,300km between it and Hawaii.

Emily Crawford, a professor at Sydney University’s law school, told Reuters, “He has to [face] up to charges that have been brought under US law”.

“It had to be US territory but it had to be the US territory closest to Australia that wasn’t a US state like Hawaii,” she added.

Saipan allows Assange to take part in a full US court process but being about as far from the mainland US as you can get.

The aeroplane that carried WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is pictured on the tarmac at Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok on June 25, 2024. (Photo by MANAN VATSYAYANA / AFP)

After he pleads guilty to the one charge, he is expected to be allowed to fly home, with his five years in UK prison counting as time served.

His wife, Stella Assange, said he will seek a pardon from the US after pleading guilty to the charge.

She told Reuters it had been “a rough few years” and that she would not really believe he was free until they were reunited.

“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. “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?” she said.

She said the couple’s two children are with her in Australia, but she has yet to tell them that he’s been freed.

“All I told them was that there was a big surprise on the morning that we left,” she told BBC 4 Radio.

“I told them we were heading to the airport. And we got on the plane and I told them that we were going to visit our family, their cousin, their grandfather and so on. And they still don’t know.”

Julian Assange on the jet. (Photo by WikiLeaks / WikiLeaks / AFP)

$750,000 cost of flight

His wife confirmed that they intend to launch a fundraising campaign as the flight he chartered to Saipan cost a stunning $750,000 and he will likely return home in debt.

Assange, heralded as a hero journalist who exposed US military abuses by some and as a criminal who threatened national security by others, was accused in a federal indictment of aiding US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in stealing hundreds of thousands of classified military files, which WikiLeaks published online in 2010.

Manning was convicted of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was released after about seven when President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.

This story was published in The New York Post and is reproduced with permission.