In an apparent coincidence, the Homeland Security Department’s privacy officer, Hugo Teufel III, issued his annual privacy report on Friday. It said there were 4,184 privacy complaints over a recent six-month period, but gave few details about them.

The Department of Homeland Security declined to make Mr. Teufel available for an interview or to say whether administration officials had edited his report.

“We are not able to comment on this specific report,” said Laura C. Keehner, the department press secretary. She added that the department’s activities to date had complied with the Office of Legal Counsel opinion and the Constitution.

A spokeswoman for Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he would write a letter Monday to the department questioning the process by which the report was made.

The Supreme Court has never ruled on whether Congress can pass a law that puts an executive branch official beyond the control of the president when it comes to giving information to oversight committees.

The court has, however, upheld statutes that gave regulatory agencies and prosecutors independence from presidential control. The Justice Department memorandum issued in January said that those precedents covered different kinds of situations and so did not apply, and that the restrictions Congress sought to impose on the reports by the Homeland Security Department privacy officer “must yield to the extent their application would interfere with the president’s constitutional authority to comment upon or amend” any information provided to Congress.

Several law professors said the administration’s legal theory went too far.

Neil Kinkopf, a law professor at Georgia State University who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton administration, called the opinion an example of the administration’s expansive theories of executive power “run amok.”