A top Tory strategist has left the Harper campaign after a media mogul outed him for allegedly supplying false information.

The Conservatives confirmed Wednesday that Patrick Muttart has parted ways with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's team.

"He has no further role in our campaign," Conservative spokesman Alykhan Velshi said from the party's Ottawa war room.

Muttart was a key backroom player in Harper's election victories in 2006 and 2008, and served as his deputy chief of staff before leaving to join an American public affairs firm.

Muttart recently returned to work on the Conservative campaign as a consultant "offering advice on messaging and strategy," according to Velshi.

A call to Muttart's office voice mail in Chicago, where he is believed to working during this campaign, was not immediately returned.

Sun Media owner Pierre Karl Peladeau took Muttart to task Wednesday, saying he supplied false information to the news organization that inaccurately portrayed Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff as a planner of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Muttart contacted Sun News vice-president Kory Teneycke -- a former Harper spokesman -- three weeks ago about a report from a "U.S. source," Peladeau wrote in a column for the Sun chain. It outlined the purported "activities and whereabouts" of Ignatieff in the weeks and months leading to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In 2003, Ignatieff was a Harvard University professor, who publicly supported the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. Ignatieff called his initial support of the invasion a "mistake" in 2007, as have many others who initially backed the U.S.-led attempt to topple Saddam Hussein.

Harper, as leader of the Official Opposition, also supported the invasion of Iraq, and criticized the Liberal government of the day for not by standing by its American allies.

"The report suggested that rather than being an observer from the sidelines, as he wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece after he entered Canadian politics, Ignatieff was in fact on the front lines and on the ground at a forward operating base in Kuwait, assisting U.S. State Department and American military officials in their strategy sessions," Peladeau wrote.

"Muttart also provided a compelling electronic image of a man very closely resembling Michael Ignatieff in American military fatigues, brandishing a rifle in a picture purported to have been taken in Kuwait in December 2002."

Peladeau said "our preliminary analysis" concluded the photo was real and had not been tampered with. But after Teneycke pressed Muttart for a better image it "revealed without a doubt that the man in question could not be the Liberal leader."

Peladeau said bad information is an "occupational hazard" of journalism, and that his organization's "in-house protocols prevented the unthinkable."

It is not clear what those protocols may have prevented.

While the Sun chain never actually published the contentious photograph, it did publish a news story that alleged Ignatieff served the United States on the "front lines" as an Iraqi war planner.

"Ignatieff linked to Iraq war planning," read the April 20 headline from the Sun chain newspapers.

In the first sentence of his story, reporter Brian Lilley writes: "As a politician in Canada, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has said that he was on the sidelines of the Iraq war, but new information reveals he was on the front lines of pre-invasion planning when he worked in the U.S."

Lilley's report cited 2003 comment from U.S. Col. Gary Crowder that he was working with Ignatieff on how to best conduct the war while minimizing civilian deaths. Lilley reported that while leading the Carr Centre for Human Rights, Ignatieff sponsored workshops with high-level U.S. military leaders prior to the invasion of the Iraq.

Peladeau's Wednesday column did not specifically mention Lilley's April 20 story. But he wrote that he believes, "this planted information was intended to first and foremost seriously damage Michael Ignatieff's campaign."

Peladeau also wrote that Muttart's offer of information to Teneycke was intended to "damage the integrity and credibility of Sun Media and, more pointedly, that of our new television operation, Sun News."

Peladeau beat down suggestions that his news organization is tight with the governing Conservatives.

"If any proof is needed to dispel the false yet still prevalent notion that Sun Media and the Sun News Network are the official organs of the Conservative Party of Canada, I offer this unfortunate episode as Exhibit A," he wrote.

"Let me be clear: This chain of newspapers had historically and will continue to stand for true, Canadian conservatism -- with a small "c" ..."

Journalism professor Elly Alboim, who has also served an advisor to former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, said the decision for Muttart to leave the campaign was standard damage control for the Conservatives.

"It sounds like what people have become used to, a kind of campaign dirty trick," he said. "People will generally kind of shrug and say that's what politicians do."