from 2010 Huffington Post article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/05/crossroads-gps-irs-investigation-_n_750771.html

Excerpts:

The IRS has also come under increasing pressure from Democrats to act against conservative or GOP-allied groups, placing the tax agency in an awkward position of being dragged into a political fight.

Last week, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Democrat Max Baucus of Montana, called on the IRS to investigate all tax-exempt groups involved in political activity. In recent weeks, President Barack Obama and top White House aides have also denounced the rise of conservative nonprofit groups that have been airing ads against Democrats in House and Senate battlegrounds.

“It’s obvious they have had a planned attack from the highest levels of the White House,” said Cleta Mitchell, a campaign finance lawyer who has represented a number of conservative groups. “You have Democrats in office seeking to use the IRS to punish their political enemies.”

From another story:  http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/brian-walsh/2013/05/14/senate-democrats-pushed-for-irs-tea-party-snooping-before-criticizing-it

Over the last three years, Democratic senators repeatedly and publicly pressured the IRS to engage in the very activities that they are only now condemning today. At the same time, Republicans repeatedly and publicly warned against this abuse of government power and pointed to a series of red flags that strongly suggested conservative political organizations were being targeted by the IRS. Those warnings were deliberately ignored by the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress.

As the New York Times reported back in 2010 :

With growing scrutiny of the role of tax-exempt groups in political campaigns, Congressional Republicans are pushing back against Democrats by warning about the possible misuse of the Internal Revenue Service to audit conservative groups….And the Republicans are also upset about an I.R.S. review requested by Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who leads the Finance Committee, into the political activities of tax-exempt groups. Such a review threatens to “chill the legitimate exercise of First Amendment rights,” wrote two Republican senators, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Jon Kyl of Arizona, in a letter sent to the I.R.S. on Wednesday. … Democrats dismissed the Republicans’ complaints as groundless.

You read that correctly.

The same Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee who this week is calling for hearings into IRS activities, specifically called on the IRS to engage in that very conduct back in 2010. And he wasn’t the only one. Just last year, a group of seven Senate Democrats sent another letter to the IRS urging them to similarly investigate these outside political organizations.

As the New York Times also reported just one week before they sent this letter:

The Internal Revenue Service is caught in an election-year struggle between Democratic lawmakers pressing for a crackdown on nonprofit political groups and conservative organizations accusing the tax agency of conducting a politically charged witch hunt.