I didn't think it was a very good response. It looked to me like it was lightly and uncritically paraphrased from a press release written by a Dilbert pointy-haired boss pushing his program, leaning much too heavily on pompously vague generalities. (E.g., why not tighten up the prose by shortening "forming a multi-layered, comprehensive approach to disrupting firearms trafficking and drug-related violence" to "leveraging our core competencies"?)

I've seen claims elsewhere that there were clearer differences: IIRC, that Mexican officials signed off on the Bush-era program, and that a significant fraction of the Bush-era program's weapons actually were tracked to the border. I also get the impression that the Bush-era program must have been much smaller, because nobody seems to have tied guns from the Bush-era program to even a dozen homicides, much less hundreds. My cautious guess right now is that those claims elsewhere were basically correct, and the two programs were so different that the comparison reflects badly on the Obama apologists. But (with some partial exceptions, like its remark that "the Mexican authorities" were not notified in the Bush program) I think the article you cited is too windy and imprecise to effectively support that guess.

Ditto.

If it was a legacy program from the Bush administration, how could Holder not have known about it?