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A senior Conservative official says the raid on Tory party headquarters last week was “over the top,” with flak-jacket-clad RCMP officers storming in and copying everything from payroll information to the strategy for a coming election.

“What, did they expect us to shoot back?” said the official, who asked not to be named.

The RCMP caught Conservative Party workers by surprise when they raided the headquarters last Tuesday armed with a search warrant.

In fact, Doug Finley, the senior campaign official in that office, was away at the time of the raid. Mr. Finley was travelling in the West; most of his staff is very young, the majority under 30.

The official said staffers were petrified.

He said the RCMP at first knocked on the door and then “pushed their way in.” About 50 staffers, who work on two floors of the downtown Ottawa office building where the headquarters is located, were told to leave.

The police also shut off the party's server, so that no one could send e-mails out for the next day and a half, while they searched the premises. Only a few staffers were allowed into the headquarters as observers during the search, the official said.

“They [the RCMP] took the entire contents of the Conservative Party,” the official said. “All of our financials … payroll records, strategy for the campaign … obviously there are discussion papers on that.”

He said the police, who executed the search for the Election Commissioner, did not get membership or donation lists that were housed on a different system.

It is not clear how much Elections Canada can or will view. But the official insists that material taken from the headquarters did not pertain to the case being investigated by the watchdog organization.

The party, he said, has done nothing illegal. “We went to great lengths to comply with Elections Canada.”

The agency accuses the Conservatives of exceeding the $18-million national campaign limit by more than $1-million by transferring money to local candidates who still had some personal spending room, then immediately taking it back to buy national ads.

The candidates could then claim the amounts as reimbursable expenses from Elections Canada.

Hundreds of pages of documents used to obtain the warrant for the raid on the Conservative headquarters were released by the court on Monday. But the party tried to get a jump on that release by holding a series of meetings with select reporters at a downtown hotel on Sunday at which they offered their side of the story.

The plan turned into a communications debacle when reporters who were not invited tried to crash the event.

The official would not say who in the Conservative Party decided on the failed communications plan. But, he said, it was not Mr. Finley, party lawyer Paul Lepsoe or Conservative press secretary Ryan Sparrow – the three officials conscripted to give the briefing.

Included in the documents is an allegation that one invoice filed with a Conservative election return may have been “altered or created by someone” other than the advertising retailer.

Liberal MP Dominic Leblanc will hold a news conference in Ottawa today about the so-called in-and-out scheme. He said he hopes that if the commissioner of Canada Elections believes forgery and fraud have been committed, he will refer that aspect of the case to the RCMP.