The one issue where Democrats have won early, decisive victories over President Donald Trump is on his Russian policy. Michael Flynn and Attorney General Jeff Sessions were both caught lying about their conversations with the Russian ambassador, forcing the former to resign as national security advisor and the latter to recuse himself from an inquiry into Russian interference in the election. This has put Trump on the defensive. Sessions’s recusal reportedly sent the president into a spiral of rage that led to his notorious tweets accusing former President Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump’s campaign.

Because the Trump administration’s possible collusion with the Russian government touches such a nerve with the president, it would be seem to be an ideal opening for Trump opponents. But some astute analysts think the Russia story is a dangerous quagmire for both political critics of Trump and journalists covering the story. They fear that the story might amount to more smoke than fire, taking attention away from more pressing issues.

“Imagine if the same kind of attention could be trained and sustained on other issues—like it has been on the Muslim travel ban,” Masha Gessen argued last week in the New York Review of Books. “Russiagate is helping [Trump]—both by distracting from real, documentable, and documented issues, and by promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.”

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi fears that the final scandal will amount to a relatively minor matter, thus discrediting the press and Trump critics:

Hypothesize for a moment that the ‘scandal’ here is real, but in a limited sense: Trump’s surrogates have not colluded with Russians, but have had ‘contacts,’ and recognize their political liability, and lie about them. Investigators then leak the true details of these contacts, leaving the wild speculations to the media and the Internet. Trump is enough of a pig and a menace that it’s easy to imagine doing this and not feeling terribly sorry that your leaks have been over-interpreted. If that’s the case, there are big dangers for the press. If we engage in Times-style gilding of every lily the leakers throw our way, and in doing so build up a fever of expectations for a bombshell reveal, but there turns out to be no conspiracy—Trump will be pre-inoculated against all criticism for the foreseeable future.

Gessen and Taibbi are right that many people have too high an expectation for the Russia story, seeing it as a magic bullet that will destroy the Trump presidency. At its most extreme, the story has led to unhinged conspiracy theories that Trump is a Manchurian candidate controlled by the Kremlin. Conservative journalist Louise Mensch, for instance, suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin had Andrew Breitbart murdered in 2012 so that Steve Bannon, now Trump’s chief strategist, could take over the media outlet. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California, said that it’s “absolutely true” that the Russians have a compromising tape of Trump with prostitutes. (She later retreated from the claim.)