READ: House Intel Committee Releases Whistleblower Complaint On Trump-Ukraine Call

READ: House Intel Committee Releases Whistleblower Complaint On Trump-Ukraine Call Enlarge this image toggle caption Evan Vucci/AP Evan Vucci/AP Updated at 1:42 p.m. According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call, the President pressured Mr. Zelenskyy to, inter alia: initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden; assist in purportedly uncovering that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election originated in Ukraine, with a specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee and examined by the U.S. cyber security firm Crowdstrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the networks in 2016; and meet or speak with two people the President named explicitly as his personal envoys on these matters, Mr. Giuliani and Attorney General Barr, to whom the President referred multiple times in tandem. The U.S. officials characterized this meeting, which was not reported publicly at the time, as a "direct follow-up" to the President's call with Mr. Zelenskyy about the "cases" they had discussed. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who had criticized Mr. Lutsenko's organization for its poor record on fighting corruption — had allegedly obstructed Ukrainian law enforcement agencies' pursuit of corruption cases, including by providing a "do not prosecute" list, and had blocked Ukrainian prosecutors from traveling to the United States expressly to prevent them from delivering their "evidence" about the 2016 U.S. election; and that former Vice President Biden had pressured former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in 2016 to fire then Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in order to quash a purported criminal probe into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board the former Vice President's son, Hunter, sat. During this same timeframe, multiple U.S. officials told me that the Ukrainian leadership was led to believe that a meeting or phone call between the President and President Zelenskyy would depend on whether Zelenskyy showed willingness to "play ball" on the issues that had been publicly aired by Mr. Lutsenko and Mr. Giuliani.