WASHINGTON — A day after threatening to hold Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt, House Democrats on Friday attempted to revive negotiations over their request for the full Robert S. Mueller III report and its underlying evidence.

They offered to prioritize some material over others and raised the possibility of limiting their request for the underlying evidence. At the same time, they asked the Justice Department to reconsider allowing all members of Congress to view a less-redacted version of his report — a move away from demanding a version with nothing blacked out.

In a letter to Mr. Barr, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the Judiciary Committee chairman, gave the department until Monday to respond and said his committee would proceed with contempt of Congress proceedings if the two sides could not agree.

“The committee is prepared to make every realistic effort to reach an accommodation with the department,” Mr. Nadler wrote. “But if the department persists in its baseless refusal to comply with a validly issued subpoena, the committee will move to contempt proceedings and seek further legal recourse.”

It is not clear whether there is any realistic chance that Mr. Barr and the Trump administration will take Mr. Nadler up on his counteroffer. But if the dispute moves to the courts, as seems likely, one of the issues that will arise is whether each branch has tried to accommodate the other branch’s constitutional needs.

In previous legal battles over the ambiguous line where Congress’s subpoena power ends and the president’s executive-privilege power begins, courts have said that the Constitution requires both sides to negotiate in good faith to find a solution. If nothing else, Mr. Nadler is establishing a record that House lawyers can point to in any such litigation as they urge a judge to find that the administration’s position is unreasonable.

In his letter, Mr. Nadler complained that the administration has offered no rationale to justify the restrictions it has placed on access to the less-redacted Mueller report — only 12 members may now see it, and they must sign a nondisclosure agreement and leave their notes with the department. He urged them to reconsider allowing all members of Congress access to the document.

Mr. Nadler renewed a request by Democrats that the department join the committee in requesting a court order to unseal sensitive grand jury material related to the investigation for congressional use.

And he agreed to prioritize certain types of underlying evidence over others for sharing with Congress. Among the materials that should come first, he said, were summaries of F.B.I. interviews and “contemporaneous notes taken by witnesses of relevant events.”

“Since these materials are publicly cited and described in the Mueller report, there can be no question about the committee’s need for and right to this underlying evidence in order to independently evaluate the facts that Special Counsel Mueller uncovered and fulfill our constitutional duties,” Mr. Nadler wrote. “As the Mueller report makes clear, this need is amplified where, as here, department policy prohibits the indictment of a sitting president and instead relies on Congress to evaluate where constitutional remedies are appropriate.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to Mr. Nadler’s offer on Friday.

In a letter to Mr. Nadler on Wednesday, explaining why it would not meet his deadline, Stephen E. Boyd, an assistant attorney general, chastised Democrats for serving the department an “overbroad and extraordinarily burdensome” subpoena. He said compliance would pose a threat to the integrity of executive branch investigations, require the disclosure of millions of pages of documents and break longstanding department practice.

“Allowing your committee to use Justice Department investigative files to reinvestigate the same matters that the department has investigated and to second-guess decisions that have been made by the department would not only set a dangerous precedent, but would also have immediate negative consequences,” he wrote.

But Mr. Boyd left open the possibility of a compromise, writing that the department would consider “further accommodations in response to a properly focused and narrowed inquiry that is supported by a legitimate legislative purpose.”

Democrats argue that position is ultimately unsustainable for the department, particularly after it produced hundreds of thousands of documents about the F.B.I.’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices and the Russia investigation to House Republicans when they were in control of the chamber in the last Congress. Democrats opposed the department handing that material over at the time, arguing that it risked political interference in the ongoing special counsel investigation, but they now assert that it set a precedent the Justice Department must live with.

It is less likely that Mr. Barr will agree to the request by Democrats to unseal grand jury material. Mr. Barr has already declined to ask the federal judge overseeing that grand jury, Beryl A. Howell, to issue such an order.

The committee is likely to soon ask Judge Howell for such an order itself, although its position would be stronger if the Justice Department were with it. It remains unclear whether Mr. Barr would direct department lawyers merely to stay out of such litigation, or to actively oppose it — setting them up to file an appeal were Judge Howell to rule that the committee has a right to see the material.

It is far from clear that the Friday offer will be enough to smooth over tensions rippling through the legislative and executive branches.

Relations between the Justice Department and House Democrats sunk to new lows on Thursday. In addition to missing Mr. Nadler’s deadline for the materials requested under subpoena, Mr. Barr chose not to show up for a Judiciary Committee hearing at which he was to be the chief witness — because he refused to be questioned by staff lawyers for the Democrats and Republicans.

Facing those snubs and a newly revealed letter from Mr. Mueller to Mr. Barr complaining about his rollout of the special counsel’s report, Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the nation’s top law enforcement officer of lying to Congress in an earlier hearing.

In a fit of fury, other Democrats called for the attorney general to be fined, thrown in a House jail or even impeached. Mr. Nadler essentially ruled out that possibility, instead blessing the contempt proceedings as a proportional punishment for continued noncooperation with his subpoena for the Mueller report and evidence.

The Justice Department shot back at Ms. Pelosi on Thursday, calling her remarks “reckless, irresponsible and false.”

Mr. Nadler made no mention of Mr. Barr’s missed testimony before the House on Thursday in his letter to the department. But he could soon ask the committee to vote on a subpoena to try to compel his appearance. Mr. Barr had objected to showing up voluntarily after Democrats insisted that their staff lawyers should be allowed to question the attorney general at length in addition to lawmakers asking questions in standard five-minute blocks.

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