As negotiations to end the long legal brawl between Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and the United States reached a critical point this spring, prosecutors presented his lawyers with a choice so madcap that a person involved thought it sounded like a line from a Monty Python movie.
His path to freedom, he was told, would pass through one of the two American-held islands in the blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
Mr. Assange, who feared being imprisoned for the rest of his life in the United States, had long insisted on one condition for any plea deal: that he never set foot in the country.
The U.S. government, in turn, had demanded that Mr. Assange plead guilty to a felony for violating the Espionage Act, which required him to appear before a federal judge.
In April, a lawyer with the Justice Department’s national security division broke the impasse with a sly workaround: How about an American courtroom that wasn’t actually inside mainland America?
Persons:
Julian Assange, Monty, Assange
Organizations:
WikiLeaks, Justice Department’s
Locations:
United, Guam, Saipan, United States, U.S, America