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The letter quotes from a DOJ review [pdf] from 11/2010, in which the ATF was found to be "not responsive" to their recommendations.
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I had not seen this review, nor have I read the entire contents. I did look at the Executive Summary and the Results portion in the first part of the report. I found the following excerpt from page 9 to be interesting:
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A June 2009 Government Accountability Office report estimated that trace data was submitted to ATF on less than a quarter of the guns seized in Mexico. Further, most trace requests that are submitted to ATF from Mexico are considered “unsuccessful” because of missing or improperly entered gun data. Although ATF has provided Mexican law enforcement with training in firearms identification, we found the percentage of total trace requests that succeed has declined since the start of Project Gunrunner. Moreover, few of the traces that do succeed generate usable investigative leads because guns submitted for tracing often were seized by Mexican officials years before the trace requests were submitted. In such cases, the time at which a gun was transferred illegally may be outside the statute of limitations and charges cannot be brought against those responsible.
We determined that Mexican law enforcement authorities do not view gun tracing as an important investigative tool for them.
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(footnote 5 omitted)
Basically, the review is stating that from Mexico's viewpoint, Project Gunrunner and the trace of firearms seized in Mexico is a waste of time! That certainly shoots a lot of holes into positions taken by the mainstream media and certain segments of our political leadership.