The cat is out of the bag.

Liberal leadership candidate George Abbott has confessed his campaign was behind a website mocking rival Christy Clark for signing up a cat as a Liberal party member -- but stopped short of admitting he set Clark up.

Abbott's admission came hours after CTV News revealed a set of suspicious paw prints in the source code of the website that linked it to a Toronto-based political strategy firm that works for Abbott.

"I have learned this afternoon that this website was created by a vendor who works for my campaign when they learned through the media that a story regarding Ms. Clark's campaign sign-ups was under development," Abbott said in a statement.

Abbott said he wasn't aware of the decision, and says he asked the site to be taken down.

The site, Kitties4Christy.com, pokes fun at the controversy surrounding the registration of Olympia, a cat belonging to a volunteer for the Clark campaign.

When the Clark campaign learned of the registration, they acted immediately to remove the cat from the rolls.

But that didn't stop the website from mocking Clark with a video of a cat saying, "The humans have caught on to our master plan."

Cute cats seemed to take pride in being part of the political process, while people worried about a catastrophe of voter fraud.

"If this was an attempt at a joke it was a very bad one," Abbott told CTV News on Friday.

So CTV News showed the website to computer scientist Rui Pereira of WavefrontCG.com. He looked at the source code and found the authors of the website had left something behind.

"It's like someone breaks a window but doesn't leave gloves," said Pereira. "He leaves fingerprints. And those fingerprints can be used to track you."

In the source code, the author of the website was identified as Bo Chen, who works for Toronto-based Campaign Research, which has worked for Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and now works for George Abbott's campaign.

Neither Chen nor the company returned phone calls.

The website records also show that the company had the site registered on February 1, three days before anyone in the public knew anything about the cat scandal.

"The fact that this was done days before the event was even discovered seemed to imply that they (the campaign) knew about this beforehand," said Pereira.

Abbott denies setting Clark up.

Joel De Guzman admitted to signing up his friend and Clark volunteer Kristy Wawryk's cat up as a joke, but denied knowing anything about Abbott's campaign.

"In all honesty it was a complete joke," he said. "I have no idea who Bo Chen is and as far as John Abbott (sic) goes I don't know how this would affect anything to tell the truth," he said.

With a report from CTV British Columbia's Jon Woodward