NEW YORK, June 26. /TASS/. A federal court judge in Saipan, the capital of the US commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, has accepted Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s guilty plea in a deal to secure his freedom, the Washington Post reports.

Assange said at the court hearing that working as a journalist, he had been guided by the First Amendment to the US Constitution that guarantees freedom of expression.

"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 the First Amendment protected that," he said.

"I accept it’s a violation of an espionage statute," Assange noted. "I believe the First Amendment and the Espionage Act are in contradiction of each other, but I accept that it would be difficult to win such a case given all the circumstances," he added, as cited by the Washington Post.

Assange pleaded guilty to a single felony charge for publishing US military secrets. The plea deal will allow him to return to Australia, his home country.

"The abrupt conclusion enables both sides to claim a degree of victory, with the [US] Justice Department able to resolve without trial a case that raised thorny legal issues and that might never have reached a jury at all given the plodding pace of the extradition process," the Associated Press said.

In 2019, Assange was placed in Britain's Belmarsh prison after being removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. For more than five years, Washington kept trying to ensure the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder from Britain to the United States, where he was accused of crimes related to the largest case of disclosure of classified information in American history.