Political operative linked to Crist, Fla. GOP admits helping create anonymous anti-Rubio site By MICHAEL C. BENDER Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau TALLAHASSEE - An anonymous Web site aimed at embarrassing Republican Gov. Charlie Crist's political rival appears to have backfired after one of Crist's top political advisers admitted that he helped develop the site. This latest twist in a suddenly sizzling primary race is at least the second time Rich Heffley, a powerful Republican political operative, has assisted a shadowy political group on behalf of Crist. "This was me going off half-cocked and I'll never do it again," said Heffley, an influential Tallahassee lobbyist who has billed Florida Republicans nearly $6 million for campaign work in the past decade. But the campaign for Republican Marco Rubio - a former state House speaker hoping to become the first Floridian in modern state politics to hand a primary defeat to a sitting governor - is questioning whether Heffley would have inserted himself into the U.S. Senate race without consent from Crist's campaign or the Republican Party of Florida. "Certainly this doesn't pass the smell test," Rubio campaign spokesman Alex Burgos said. Heffley said neither the campaign nor the party was involved - their participation probably would have violated federal campaign laws, a legal expert said. Heffley said he is not being paid by the Crist campaign. He has received about $250,000 from the state Republican Party this year, but a party spokeswoman said it was for work related to state House and Senate campaigns, not Crist's U.S. Senate campaign. Heffley said he helped someone else create the site, TruthAboutRubio.com, after an anonymous YouTube video surfaced last Saturday casting Crist in the role of Hitler during the collapse of the Nazi regime. Rubio quickly condemned the video, a spoof of the 2004 movie Downfall. Heffley told The Palm Beach Post today that his role in the anti-Rubio site was to collect news articles critical of Rubio. He refused to name his collaborator. But after the site was anonymously published Tuesday, a Rubio supporter quickly found evidence that Heffley was involved. Computer code from a picture showed it came from a computer named "rheffley." News of the computer code was first reported Wednesday by a conservative blog, RedState.com, that favors Rubio, whose supporters say they have been energized by surge of momentum in recent days. Rubio's upstart campaign was given little chance of challenging Crist until campaign finance reports this month showed Rubio raise $1 million from July through September, tripling his collections during the first half of the year. Since Wednesday, Rubio's supporters have flooded Heffley's site and helped tilt a series of polls in Rubio's favor. The most recent poll question on Friday asked whether Rubio was the next Katherine Harris, a Republican who was drubbed in a 2008 U.S. Senate race. The answer was an overwhelming "no." While Heffley regrets not being more thoughtful about the hastily-created Web site, he notes that Rubio's supporters were quick to point out his involvement but have not disputed the content. The articles Heffley assembled involve Rubio and allegations of corruption, insider-dealing and budget pork projects. "The focus-grouped, canned Marco Rubio speech may not fit the reality of what he's done in the short time he was in office," Heffley said. Meanwhile, Heffley - who helped run Crist's successful 2008 campaign for a property tax constitutional amendment - is no stranger to bare-knuckle Florida politics. In 2008, his company, Strategic Direction, consulted for People for a Better Florida Fund, an electioneering group being suing for defamation during a South Florida Democratic primary. Another client of Heffley's company that year, Floridians for Conservative Values, accused the primary opponent of Republican Will Pruitt, the brother of former Senate President Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, of wanting to turn Leesburg, a town of about 16,000 located 45 miles northwest of Orlando, into Las Vegas. Heffley, who served on the Florida Elections Commission from 1999-2003 after an appointment from then-Gov. Jeb Bush, created a company during Crist's 2006 gubernatorial primary, Issues Advocacy, that has worked for only one political client in the state: a somewhat secretive campaign committee known as Conservative Values Coalition. That campaign committee, which can raise unlimited amounts of money without having to acknowledge whether it coordinates political strategy with state candidates, tarred Crist's primary opponent in ways that Crist himself was often unwilling. The group painted then-state CFO Tom Gallagher, who had an assortment of similar political groups at his disposal, as anti-gun, pro-gambling and ambivalent on abortion - a triad of political positions that can all but guarantee defeat in a Florida Republican primary. The so-called coalition was funded by an assortment of gambling and development interests and a $10,000 check from then-Oviedo City Councilman Jim Greer. Greer eventually became Crist's hand-picked chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, which shares office space with Heffley and, more recently, Crist's U.S. Senate campaign. A request to interview Greer for this story was declined. Crist, who was at a campaign fund-raiser on Friday in Arizona, was also unavailable for comment. "If it was discovered that Crist or his campaign was behind this Web site, it would need to have a disclaimer under federal law," said Paul Ryan, head of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington D.C. "If, by contrast, it's just a political junkie who wants to run a blog about an ongoing federal race, it would not be subject to a disclaimer," Ryan said. "And that makes good sense."