A year ago, EDMC's stock dropped on news that the Obama administration was going to enforce strict regulation on for-profit schools. That was close! Thank heavens for lobbyists!

This certainly sounds like a factor, if not the main reason, for Snowe's decision not to run for reelection. Maybe it was the final straw, since Snowe was also facing a primary challenge from the tea party:

Last August, while Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was in the midst of an intensive round of fundraising for her 2012 reelection bid, a four-year-old civil lawsuit alleging fraud by an education company in which she and her husband are heavily invested became public.

Nationally, most of the coverage of Snowe's decision to drop her reelection bid has focused on the centrist Republican's frustration with the polarized politics on Capitol Hill. But in Maine, a few newspapers have speculated that her husband's legal entanglements had a role in Snowe's sudden and surprising decision, which left her with more than $3 million in her campaign coffers and her party without a Senate candidate less than three weeks before the filing deadline for Maine's June 12 primary.

According to the senator's most recent financial disclosure form, she and her husband, former Maine Gov. John McKernan Jr., have investments worth between $2 million and $10 million in Education Management Corp., a Pittsburgh-based company that operates for-profit higher education institutions. McKernan is chairman of the board of directors of the company, now embroiled in a lawsuit in which the federal goverment, 11 states and the District of Columbia are seeking to recover a portion of the $11 billion in federal student aid that the education firm has received since July 2003.

Originally filed in April 2007 by a pair of whistleblowers, the lawsuit alleges that the company violated a federal law that prohibits schools from paying admissions officers based on the number of students they recruit and enroll. [Note: This is one of the illegal practices I saw where I worked. I found out after that my company was previously cited for this and was operating under a federal compliance order. Didn't matter, they did what they wanted.] Those numbers can affect a school's revenues because more students mean a school is potentially eligible for more federal aid dollars. The whistleblowers alleged, and provided documents indicating, that they were paid bounties for the number of students they enrolled.

The Justice Department's decision to intervene on Aug. 8 made the lawsuit, which had been under seal, public. In its complaint, Justice alleged that Education Management Corp. submitted "knowingly false, misrepresented, and/or improper certifications" to the Education Department, stating that it did not offer enrollment incentives to its admissions officers. Without those certifications, students enrolling at the the company's schools, which include Argosy University, Brown Mackie College and South University, would not be eligible for federal financial aid.

The complaint names Snowe's husband, noting that in December 2006, while he was the company's chief executive officer, McKernan personally signed certifications that Education Management Corp.'s schools complied with the ban on offering compensation to admissions officers based on the number of students they recruit.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Anthony J. Guida Jr., who serves on the board of the for-profit schools' trade association, the Association of Private Colleges and Universities (aka lobbying arm) is also a senior VP for regulatory affairs at EDMC. He was also appointed to the United States Department of Education’s Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance by... Nancy Pelosi. His term expired in 2011.

The company's CEO is Todd S. Nelson, the former CEO of the University of Phoenix. While there, he signed a $9.8 million settlement with the Department of Education for “systematically and intentionally” breaking the federal rules against paying recruiters for students. What a job reference, huh? The New York Times also states:

Education Management, which is 40 percent owned by Goldman Sachs, received more than $855 million in federal student aid in 2003-4, and more than $1 billion in 2005-6. According to the complaint, in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, it received more than $2.2 billion in federal student aid, representing 89.3 percent of its net revenue.

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TPM reports that Reid is close to pulling off senatorial support for the public option - and the White House wants Olympia Snowe's trigger option instead.

In other words, the White House wants the plan that won't work, so they can claim it's a bipartisan plan. Or is it that the administration wants a plan that won't really work, and they're using bipartisanship as a cover? Just asking the obvious question, here:

Multiple sources tell TPMDC that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is very close to rounding up 60 members in support of a public option with an opt out clause, and are continuing to push skeptical members. But they also say that the White House is pushing back against the idea, in a bid to retain the support of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

"They're skeptical of opt out and are generally deferential to the Snowe strategy that involves the trigger," said one source close to negotiations between the Senate and the White House. "They're certainly not calming moderate's concerns on opt-out."

This new development, which casts the White House as an opponent of all but the most watered down form of public option, is likely to yield backlash from progressives, especially those in the House who have been pushing for a more maximal version of reform.

It also suggests for perhaps the first time that the White House's supposed hands off approach that ostensibly allowed the two chambers in Congress to craft their own bill has been discarded.

High level White House officials have floated the trigger idea a number of times, and it seems they continue to do so, even at this, crucial stage of the health care reform process, when their involvement is greatest. That has senators who support the public option concerned.

UPDATE: Big Tent Democrat has another take. So does Nate Silver.