Hello from CNN, I'm Joe Beck, with the five things you need to know for Thursday, September 28th.

House Republicans have started their first hearing for their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden after struggling for months

to link the President to his son Hunter's foreign business dealings.

Whether it was lunches, phone calls, White House meetings, or official foreign trips.

Hunter Biden cashed in by arranging access to Joe Biden, the family brand.

That was part of Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee

Jason Smith's opening statement. In a surprise turn, one of the GOP's own

witnesses undercut their main argument, saying there isn't enough evidence to conclude that there was corruption by the Biden's.

This hearing will set the stage for what the rest of the inquiry will look like,

and CNN Sarah Murray says there are a number of questions Republicans want to address.

The first of these three questions really has to do with whether Joe Biden at any point decided to trade access, appearance of access or perform any sort of

official acts in exchange for money for either him or for his family and then the

last one has to do with his son

Hunter Biden and the ongoing investigations and whether Joe Biden ever

interfered in those investigations. You can't ignore the backdrop of this. We are

days away from a government shutdown and we expect to see Democrats just hammering their Republican colleagues about focusing on this impeachment inquiry today rather than the shutdown on hand.

And speaking of those shutdown fears, we've been talking about it for weeks, but with just two days left to reach a deal,

it really does look like the government could run out of funding.

House Republican leaders held a closed door meeting today to try to come up with a way out,

as CNN's Lauren Fox explains.

What we know right now is tonight they are going to start voting on a series of

individual one-year spending bills all of which would not prevent a government

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