A Commerce Department spokesman, Kevin Manning, said in a statement that “nothing in the court-ordered supplemental production changes the sound rationale” for the question that Mr. Ross had outlined. “Executive branch officials discussing important issues prior to formulating policy is evidence of good government, and the secretary’s previous testimony before Congress is consistent with that fact.”

The new disclosures come as the Trump administration is beginning to assert greater control over the operations of the Census Bureau, which has been run on an acting basis by career staff members for more than a year.

This week, Mr. Trump nominated a little-known manager at the Peace Corps, Steven Dillingham, to be the agency’s permanent director. Mr. Dillingham, who has overseen smaller statistical agencies at the Justice and Transportation departments, served in the 1980s as an adviser to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group.

On Monday, the Census Bureau declined to reappoint the chairwoman of the agency’s scientific advisory council, a panel of academics and business experts who monitor the progress of each census and suggest improvements and changes. Barbara A. Anderson, a University of Michigan demographer, headed the committee in March when it issued a public rebuke to the bureau warning that the citizenship question was a mistake.

The 600-plus documents released on Sunday lay out a yearlong chronology of the gestation of the citizenship question, chronicling Mr. Ross’s frustration with delays, his aides’ efforts to overcome them and the seeming consternation of career Census Bureau officials tasked with carrying out his orders.

In May 2017, a month after being asked by Mr. Bannon to discuss the census, Mr. Ross appeared to fulminate in an email at the failure of career Census Bureau officials to act on his preferences. “They emphasize that they have settled with Congress on the questions to be asked,” he wrote. “I am mystified why nothing have [sic] been done in response to my months-old request that we include the citizenship question. Why not?”

“We will get that in place,” Earl Comstock, the Commerce Department director of policy and strategic planning, responded. “We need to work with Justice to get them to request that citizenship be added back as a census question.”