He is a graduate of the United States Army Aviation School and served in both active and reserve status as a combat helicopter pilot and commander for over 16 years.
[8] He served as chairman of the United States 10th Congressional District's Service Academy Selection Committee and as a certified leader in the Boy Scouts of America.
Calk promised that his Federal Savings Bank "will endeavor to hire as many qualified Chicago residents as possible" in exchange for receiving taxpayer-funded grants from the city of $10,000 per employee, to be used for job training.
However, according to expert testimony in a subsequent trial, 197 of the Federal Savings Bank's new hires had previously worked at Calk's Chicago Bancorp, which only had 223 employees at the start of 2012 and was formally dissolved in early 2013.
The magazine American Banker described the Calk brothers as pulling off "a neat trick": "Their bank, among the most profitable in the country that year, collected $3.6 million in public subsidies in substantial part by rehiring employees who they had recently fired from a separate company that they also owned.
On July 28, Calk became directly involved in discussions about loans to Manafort and his son-in-law for investment properties, which Raico told the court was unusual.
On October 6, 2016, Manafort emailed Calk to say that he had been mistaken in saying at this lunch that he owed $2.5 million on a Bridgehampton, New York, property that he intended to use as collateral.
[16] Brennan also testified that bank employees had noticed that Manafort seemed to have no income as of July 2016, though he claimed to be owed $2.4 million, and that he was more than 90 days late on a $300,000 credit card bill.
[16] At a 2018 bail hearing and in a superseding indictment filed against Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, the office of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleged that Manafort had fraudulently applied for around $16 million in loans from "Lender D," reported by multiple sources at the time as the Federal Savings Bank of Chicago, before and shortly after the 2016 presidential election.
"[9][20][21] In February 2018 the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reported that Mueller's office was investigating whether there had been a quid pro quo arrangement in which Calk approved the loans in return for a position in the Trump administration as Secretary of the Army.
[24] During Manafort's August 2018 trial, prosecutors introduced as evidence emails from Calk showing that on August 4, 2016, he wrote Manafort that "I am happy and willing to serve," and that in November, just after Trump's election, he sent Manafort a resume and a request to be nominated Secretary of the Army, adding that he would also be willing to serve as chief of the departments of Treasury, Commerce, Housing or Urban Development, and Defense, or as ambassador to the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Ireland, Australia, China, United Nations, the European Union, Portugal, the Vatican, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Singapore.
[14] During the presidential transition, Manafort wrote in an email to his former deputy Rick Gates, then serving on the inauguration committee, that "we need to discuss Steve Calk for Secretary of Army.