Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) said Wednesday that the Senate could subpoena California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to explain state and local failures during the Palisades Fire in January, which devastated northwest Los Angeles.

Johnson appeared at a press conference on Capitol Hill alongside Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Pacific Palisades resident Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star who lost his home in the fire and has been documenting the government’s struggle to respond.

As Breitbart News reported earlier this week, Scott and Johnson announced an investigation into the Palisades Fire through the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. The investigation will be handled by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s (HSGAC) Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) — and, Johnson said, it would have full subpoena powers.

Though Scott said earlier in the week that the committee hoped to have Newsom’s “cooperation,” Johnson noted that he had full subpoena power, and could use it if Newsom of other officials were not forthcoming with information.

Scott, who visited Pacific Palisades last month, saw the aftermath of a fire that claimed 12 lives and destroyed nearly 7,000 structures in Pacific Palisades and Malibu. He told reporters that he had been shocked by the lack of rebuilding in Los Angeles. As a former governor of Florida who had responded to disasters in the past, he noted said that Florida placed a greater emphasis on rebuilding than California seemed to be doing.

“It’s like nothing’s happened. I think I saw one house being rebuilt,” Scott said.

The focus of the investigation, Scott said, would be to determine the cause of the fire, to help the victims, and to prevent such a disaster from happening again — not just in California, but anywhere in the United States.

Pratt said that the community likely could have been saved if state and local officials had done their jobs — such as clearing the brush in the Topanga State Park, where the fire had started. While acknolwedging that there might be problems on federal land as well, Pratt pointed out that Newsom bore responsibility for the failure to clear brush on the specific piece of land where the fire started on January 7.

“There are some pretty simple things, pretty low-cost things” that could have been done to save Pacific Palisades, he observed.

He said that the community was still in shock. “I know that nobody feels safe for this not to happen again.”

He echoed the Senators’ hopes that there would be national lessons to be drawn. “I feel like this is going to be so powerful for all of the United States,” he said.

Both Scott and Johnson seemed open to the idea of a Special Master to oversee federal spending in California on the fire — an idea from the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund, which Breitbart News has highlighted before.

Scott also said the committee would investigate how and why many Californians lost their home insurance during fire season, adding that it would have been illegal for insurance companies to behave that way in Florida. He said that the committee’s investigation would examine if there were ways to make policyholders whole.

The investigation could conceivably widen to include the Eaton Fire, which erupted later on the same day in Altadena and Pasadena, further east.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.