Story highlights Adam Goldberg: Trump administration making mistakes with Russia collusion probe

It's an investigation the Clinton administration would have known how to handle

Adam Goldberg served as special associate counsel to President Bill Clinton from 1996-1999. He is co-founder of Trident DMG, a crisis management and strategic communications firm. You can follow him on Twitter at @AWGoldberg. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) For over two years, I served as special associate counsel to President Bill Clinton, working to help manage various scandals.

If you think President Donald Trump's crisis-management methods are hard to understand, I can tell you that they utterly perplex those of us who plied the trade in the Clinton White House. We sit and watch one avoidable rookie mistake after another, wondering if Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer remember the 1990s. Notwithstanding the gravity of the issues confronting the Trump administration, I wanted to offer some advice in the spirit of bipartisanship.

Adam Goldberg

As White House chief of staff and press secretary, both Priebus and Spicer need to up their crisis game considerably. Until they do, the White House will continue to suffer damaging leaks -- like Tuesday's, when it was reported that the President sought the help of the director of national intelligence and the director of the National Security Agency to persuade the public there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia. Moreover, for the moment, former FBI Director James Comey is slated to testify publicly before the Senate Intelligence Committee after Memorial Day. And all this is happening to a White House staff who have a President who has turned self-inflicted wounds into an art form.

Travelgate; Arlington Cemetery burials; Why turn to the Clinton White House for advice? That's a fair question, but the answer is simple: experience. Let's run through a list of some of the more significant congressional, FBI, independent counsel, and media investigations the Clinton White House had to deal with: Whitewater technology transfers to China; campaign finance ; and impeachment . If you sense from this list that the Clinton White House must have gotten good at managing scandals, you'd be right. So it would be wise for the Trump White House, and Priebus and Spicer especially, to heed three particular tips.

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First, stop talking in the briefing room about the Russia investigation. A major Clinton White House innovation was creating a comprehensive team inside the White House counsel's office who could do everything -- the legal, political, and communications parts of every investigation. When White House press secretary Mike McCurry got a question on sleepovers in the Lincoln bedroom , for example, he didn't answer it; he just referred it to the counsel's office and we handled it. That way, McCurry got to talk policy and the people who worked 24/7 on the investigations were the ones to speak to the press about them.

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