I’ve put the original post here below the fold. It needs to now be substantially updated and is worth rewriting.

This morning, to great fanfare in Florida, an anonymous website called truthaboutrubio.com went live.

The website was registered one day ago on October 27, 2009, but it purported to have content all the way back to 2007.

RedState probed the source code of the website and found this:

img src=”///Users/rheffley/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png” alt=”" /

Who is rheffley? How about Rich Heffley.

Mr. Heffley played a key role in getting Charlie Crist elected Governor in 2006. More importantly, Mr. Heffley is now Charlie Crist’s top advisor in his Florida Senate race. Mr. Heffley’s business address is 420 E Jefferson St, Tallahassee, FL, which is the address of the Florida Republican Party. Mr. Heffley rents office space from the Florida GOP and the Florida GOP pays him $10,000.00 a month. His business partners are Jim Rhimes and Randy Enwright. If Enwright’s name sounds familiar, it should. He’s been heavily involved in the GOP and is the Republican National Committee’s field consultant.

I tried to call Mr. Heffley for comment and he would not call me back. A St. Petersburg Times reporter did get Mr. Heffley to answer. Mr. Heffley refused to answer questions about the website and within minutes of that phone call the website was taken down.

About an hour later, the website came back up and the source code identifying Mr. Heffley had disappeared.

Not also that Charlie Crist denied any involvement with this website, but knew enough to know that the one day old website contained press clippings “all in the public domain.”

That is an admission against interests that Charlie Crist’s campaign is responsible for this website. That also creates a potentially serious breach of federal law for Charlie Crist.

Because this website was produced by Charlie Crist’s chief campaign consultant to benefit Charlie Crist, it requires a disclaimer that the site is paid for and authorized by Charlie Crist for Senate. The site does not contain that. In the alternative, considering Mr. Heffley shares office space with the Florida Republican Party, there could be a coordination violation too. How exactly does Mr. Heffley get access to the internet from his office? Is it paid for by the Florida GOP? That causes even more questions revolving around federal elections laws.

Likewise, the website shows a total lack of respect for copyright laws — taking copyrighted content and republishing it wholesale and more likely than not without permission. As mentioned above, Crist, who has surprising knowledge of a one day old website, said all the press clips were “all in the public domain,” which is nonsense as applicable to copyright law.

More significantly, this smacks of desperation. Crist has abandoned any pretense of being the conservative in the race and is instead having to use frivolous stories to claim Rubio is not conservative either. To get a feel for just how frivolous the stories are, consider this one (I can’t link to individual posts there because the site at this time does not allow it). The site highlights that Rubio has received around $3000.00 from gambling related interests, but Rubio opposes gambling. Rubio has not altered his position at all. But he has taken the money. Somehow this makes Rubio a hypocrite for not altering his positions after receiving money from groups with a different position. That is one of many silly stories.

Charlie Crist this evening is denying any connection to this. But it does not matter. The site was produced by his campaign consultant from his office in an effort to hurt Crist’s opponent and thereby help Crist. This could potentially cause Crist all sorts of legal trouble with federal law.

————————————–

ORIGINAL POST:

Rich Heffley is a Charlie Crist appointee to the Florida Sports Foundation.

Heffley is a lobbyist and Republican operative who played a big behind-the-scenes role in Crist’s 2006 campaign and just recently helped secure victory for Amendment 1 and John McCain.

A RedState reader prowled through the source code for the anti-Rubio website and found an interesting file that comes up. Here’s the source code:

Heffley has also maxed out to Charlie Crist’s Senate campaign.

I put in a call to Mr. Heffley, but have not heard back from him.

UPDATED: The Crist campaign has now taken down the anti-Rubio site.

UPDATED 2: The Anti-Rubio Site is now live again, but the code clearly identifying Rich Heffley has been stripped from the site.