Washington, D.C. – Tonight as President Obama addressed the growing IRS controversy, U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) discussed the situation with Hugh Hewitt.

Excerpts below and full audio is attached.

“Outrage and apology is not enough.  I mean, who was he apologizing to? We need to see some action, and that means…some people have to get fired, we have to have an investigation.  They’ve talked about a criminal investigation today down at the Justice Department.  That’s appropriate.  But frankly, we need to be sure the House and Senate do a thorough investigation of it and we need to get to the bottom of it.”

“I got involved in this because the Tea Party groups back home came to me and said…these questions are just incredibly comprehensive and don’t seem to make much sense. Why are they asking us all this stuff? So we actually spearheaded that letter with Orrin Hatch over a year ago saying to the IRS, ‘why are you asking these questions?’”

“One thing we don’t know yet, and this is one of the questions that I’m asking is, ‘Who directed them?’ In other words, there’s been a lot of discussion the last 48 hours about what they, the IRS lower-level folks, told their supervisors, what the supervisors may have told Treasury in Washington, and so on. We haven’t heard anything about the other side of that. What direction did they get? It seems to me unlikely that relatively low-level employees were on this political witch-hunt without some kind of direction. And so that’s some of the information we need to dig into and find out about.”

“It seems to me to be a pattern here, not just at the IRS, but also at other agencies and departments.”

“There’s a lot of politics going on through government that is simply inappropriate, and I do think that’s a cultural issue. I don’t think it’s just one agency or one employee.”

“I do think this is going to be a point at which the American people face this fundamental issue, ‘Does big government have all the answers?’ And I think our answers as Republicans has been big government does not work for the tax payers, it doesn’t work because it’s inefficient, it doesn’t work because the left hand doesn’t often know what the right hand is doing, but it also doesn’t work because of this intrusion in our lives…”