In this case, if the attorney general had provided information from the Mueller investigation to the director, the director would have been obligated to notify the intelligence committees of the agencies’ activities based on that intelligence.

If the director did not provide it, the congressional committees could and should have demanded the information. At least in the House, it looks like that didn’t happen. When Democrats took over this year, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, ramped up its investigation, but statements by him suggest that the committee has not yet received foreign intelligence obtained during the Mueller investigation.

So, by design or by ignorance, the executive branch agencies may not have followed the laws they have sworn to uphold. And the congressional committees may have failed to fulfill their oversight responsibilities. The House Intelligence Committee should demand immediate attention to the mandates of the Patriot and National Security Acts. The committee’s staff should make informal inquiries to determine whether, and the extent to which, William Barr, Jeff Sessions and Dan Coats provided this information to the intelligence committees. If the inquiry yields nothing or reveals that the law has not been followed, Mr. Barr, Mr. Coats and others in the executive branch should be called to testify before the committee.

Even with the completion of the Mueller investigation, Mr. Barr has argued that grand jury information is sacrosanct and will be redacted from the materials he gives to Congress and the public. Yet the entire purpose of Section 3040, as well as the specific exception added to the grand jury secrecy rules themselves, were to require the identification and sharing of critical intelligence collected by law enforcement during an investigation, and certainly after it has ended.

Moreover, the constitutional requirements for congressional access mandate that the executive branch give all national security information to Congress — if the intelligence committees demand it. No court has ever ruled that the executive can withhold such information from Congress.

As a nation in 2001 we learned a very painful lesson, that keeping vital foreign intelligence from the intelligence agencies, and ultimately Congress, must give way in the face of potential terrorist attacks.

If Mr. Barr wants to argue that attacks by foreign enemies on our democracy are any less critical to our national security than terrorism, we will see how Congress and the American people respond.