Conservatives held secret meetings with select reporters Sunday to reveal details about why Elections Canada officers raided their Ottawa headquarters -- and to give their side of the story before court documents are released this week.

The party showed CTV News the court application for a search warrant, which confirmed that Elections Canada officials and RCMP were looking for evidence of an "alleged scheme" by Tories to spend more than allowed on election advertising.

The document alleges the Conservatives violated the Elections Act "by incurring election expenses that exceeded the election expense spending limit" by $1.1 million.

It also alleges that 67 Tory candidates "improperly" sought taxpayer-funded rebates on expenses they did not incur.

An Ontario judge ordered the application to be unsealed last Friday, but court officials had said they would be unable to make the document public until Monday at the earliest.

Conservatives obtained their own copy of the application and contacted a limited number of journalists to discuss the search warrant Sunday.

They scheduled briefings at an Ottawa hotel, but when word of the meetings leaked out to other media organizations, the party moved the briefings to another hotel next to their party headquarters.

Liberal House Leader Ralph Goodale said the secrecy around the meetings likely did more harm than good for the Conservatives.

"Obviously, that smacks of desperation," he told CTV News. "What they've done is made their situation worse, because they look so guilty."

Party officials spoke about the search warrant for roughly 45 minutes, saying the party did nothing wrong and that they had followed all regulations in election spending, before showing reporters the court document.

RCMP conducted the search on Tory headquarters last week, seizing a long list of financial and correspondence records that included invoices, receipts and emails.

Conservatives insisted Sunday that other parties had acted in a similar way during federal elections and they followed all regulations in election spending.

The party has alleged the raid was a reaction to a civil lawsuit against Elections Canada, and that it was possibly timed to delay Conservative lawyers from questioning Elections Canada officials.

Elections Canada has refused to reimburse the Tories for more than $1 million in advertising spending during the last election. The agency contends that the Tories surpassed their national advertising allowance and refused to accept the Tory claims that local ads were not national in scope.

With a report by CTV's Roger Smith in Ottawa