An organization that applies for a 501(c) 3 status as a non-profit, non-political charitable, educational organization, automatically has a tax-exempt status but it is not activated until the IRS grants it official recognition as such.
Then previous donations can become tax-deductible. Usually it took about 3-6 months for a tax exempt status to be granted. Under Obama, it’s a lifetime, which is illegal.
Believe me, this topic has a long history of the Left breaking all kinds of IRS codes, as I testified through a study to the House Ways & Means Committee in 1987, but nobody was interested in what I had discovered as an investigative reporter.
I think the odd thing (well, one of them) about this was that the Obama organization proclaimed contributions as tax deductible even before they received 501(c)3 status. Incidentally, I read somewhere that most of the tea party orgs were applying for a different status (501(c)4?) which didn’t even permit their contributions to be tax deductible. In that case, the whole point was to slow them down if not definitively halt them until after the election.