Deniz 
Late Tuesday’s single 8.07 ($496,000) gift almost fully fulfilled the $520,000 emergency appeal goal for Julian Assange’s plane and recovery expenses within hours of it becoming live.
Assange’s Return to Australia
Along with crypto donations via Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dash, Zcash, Dogecoin, XRP, and Monero addresses, the donation page features fiat choices via Crowdfunder and GoFundMe.
Data from blockchain explorer Mempool shows that the 8.07 BTC payment is the biggest of a total of 8.1 BTC ($498,000) sent to the appeal using bitcoin. There were few donations to the other bitcoin addresses that the page offered. Still, an additional $375,000 in fiat donations ensured the target was clearly exceeded.
“Assange will thus arrive in Australia debt-free, thanks in great part to the generosity of a single Bitcoin whale,” Altana Digital Currency Fund CIO Alistair Milne posted on X.
After the WikiLeaks founder boarded flight VJ199 to the remote Pacific island of Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the western Pacific, the Free Assange campaign and his wife Stella Assange launched an emergency appeal on Tuesday morning.
“Julian Assange has embarked on flight VJT199 to Saipan. If all goes well it will bring him to freedom in Australia. But his travel to freedom comes at a massive cost: he will owe $520,000 which he is obligated to pay back to the Australian government for the charter flight. He was not permitted to fly commercial airlines or routes to Saipan and onward to Australia,” the appeal mentioned.
Generous Bitcoin Whale Donation
Julian’s health is also desperately in need of recovery following 14 years of captivity and five years in maximum security jail. We are starting an emergency campaign to help him pay the airline debt and significant amounts to guarantee his healing, well-being, and safety when he gets here. Every helping hand counts, it says.
In a hearing on the island on Wednesday, Assange entered a guilty plea to one charge. Based on his prior incarceration time, he was sentenced to 62- months.
Later on Wednesday morning, the charter airplane sent Assange back to Australia as a free man, therefore ending his multi-year legal struggle.
Following his publication on WikiLeaks of a vast collection of records revealing claimed war crimes committed by U.S. armed personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, Assange’s case contains allegations of espionage against the government of the United States.
Chelsea Manning, a whistleblower serving as a U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Iraq at the time, provided the materials leaked to WikiLeaks.
Under the U.S. Espionage Act, the U.S. Department of Justice charged the WikiLeaks founder on several counts in 2019. Should he be found guilty of these offenses, the theoretical maximum term he could be subjected to is 170 years.
Following a plea agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, Assange was released from the high-security Belmarsh jail in the United Kingdom on Monday after more than five years. Admitting only one of the eighteen counts,
Judge Manglona declared in court on Wednesday, “You stand before me to be sentenced in this criminal action,” Stella Assange claimed. “I would note the following: timing matters. If this case was brought before me sometime 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.”
Another important point, according to the judge, was that the U.S. government declared there was no particular victim and that the distribution of material did not cause any physical harm.
“These two facts are very relevant. I would say if this was still unknown and closer to (2012) I would not be so inclined to accept this plea agreement before me,” the judge added. “But it’s the year 2024 … it appears this case ends with me here in Saipan. 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.”
Speaking to the Australian Parliament on Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reportedly expressed “very pleased” by the result of Assange’s case, according to Bloomberg.
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