The Washington Post Quotes Trevor Potter: How the IRS Seeded the Clouds for Political Deluge 3 Years Later

The Washington Post quoted Trevor Potter  concerning the issues that led up to the IRS controversy. In 2010, the IRS team in Cincinnati noticed a stream of applications with political sounding names.  This initiated extra scrutiny of right-leaning groups in an attempt to separate the legitimate tax-exempt groups from those working to get candidates elected. The suspicion of conservatives grew as they complained of harassment by the tax agency. At the same time, the IRS faced growing criticism from the outside that it was not doing enough to examine an increasing number of politically active groups seeking tax-exempt status. For the complete story, please visit The Washington Post's website. 
 
Excerpt taken from the article.

"You had a lot of pressure on the IRS to figure out who and what should be a (c)(4) and complaints being filed by groups saying they had erred in granting (c)(4) status," said Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center and a former Federal Elections Commission chairman. "You had (c)(4)s on both the Democratic and Republican side spending a lot on politics. That's the background of how we got here."