Further ramifications of the scandal came in summer 2009, when leadership of "Cotidianul" newspaper was taken over by Cornel Nistorescu, whose change in editorial line prompted a wave of resignations among the newspaper panelists, who identified the new policies as an unmitigated anti-Băsescu bias, and complained that Nistorescu was imposing censorship on independent contributors. In subsequent statements, Nistorescu alleged that his adversaries represented a pro-Băsescu "pack" led by Tismăneanu himself. Journalist Mădălina Șchiopu reacted against this perspective and other accusations aimed by Nistorescu toward his former colleagues, arguing that they amounted to "a story with little green men and flying saucers" which served to cover the "fundamental incompatibility between decisions and the notion of decency." She viewed "the idea that the source for all that is wrong with the Romanian press can be found somewhere in Tismăneanu's entourage" as equivalent to declaring that Tismăneanu "turns into a "vârcolac" under the fool moon and eats the newly born". In one of his other editorials, the new "Cotidianul" editor revisited Tismăneanu's past, quoting statements from the 1980s which, he wrote, made Tismăneanu "a devoted communist activist" incompatible with his later appointments: "The chairman of the Presidential Commission could do anything, except condemning that which he has supported." The events also prompted an article by Tismăneanu's friend, novelist Mircea Cărtărescu. It sarcastically included Nistorescu, alongside Vadim Tudor, Roșca-Stănescu, Voiculescu, Geoană and businessman Dinu Patriciu, all of them adverse to Băsescu, among the "champions of democracy", noting that himself, Tismăneanu and other public figures who did not abandon Băsescu's cause "despite his human flaws", were being negatively portrayed as "ass-kissers" and "blind people".