Sinn Féin's Chief Negotiator, Mr Martin McGuinness is travelling to the US tomorrow to update the White House on latest developments in the peace process.
The visit comes after the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell claimed several Sinn Féin figures had resigned from the IRA's Army Council.
Mr McDowell also said he believed there had been a number of upheavals within the IRA leadership recently. It was reported last weekend that certain key members of the Sinn Féin leadership - allegedly Mr Adams, Mr McGuinness and Kerry North TD Martin Ferris - had stepped down from the IRA's Army Council last week.
"I don't think that by itself amounts to a severance between the two organisations," Mr McDowell said. "It's an acknowledgment, in my view, that there was a very structured link between them in the past."
Meanwhile, Mr McDowell insisted today the long-awaited IRA statement must contain a pledge to give up "every single bullet" and that "partial armament" was not an option.
There is growing speculation the IRA will publish a statement on its future later this week. In a major speech in Belfast last April, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams urged the IRA to end its armed struggle and follow his party down the political route.
Michael McDowell told reporters this morning the IRA needed to provide concrete proof it was embracing democracy if it wants to be fully accepted in the political process.
"There is no position whatsoever between being armed and being unarmed for the IRA," he said. "There is no question of there being some quota of arms being held back or whatever. If the IRA are decommissioning they must decommission all their weapons in their entirety, every single pistol, every single bullet, the lot."
Mr McDowell said today it was time for the IRA to cease all activity, criminal and paramilitary, and disband.
Michael McDowell
"There has to be an end to all crime, there has to be an end to all paramilitarism and there has to be a complete and total ending of the situation whereby the IRA have access to arms and that means decommissioning of a verifiable kind," the Minister said.
"In that context, once that happens then the IRA has to address its own future and it can't continue in existence."
Last night Mr Adams and Sinn Féin chief negotiator Martin McGuinness, in Dublin for a book publication, refused to be drawn on when the statement would be released or what it might contain. They had spent the afternoon at meetings in Downing Street, further fuelling speculation a major move was imminent.
Mr McDowell insisted the IRA must be unequivocal in its rejection of violence for the Northern Ireland peace process to emerge from the current impasse. "Put it this way, there will be no breakthrough unless all those elements are there," he said.
"We are no longer in the business of fudge or equivocation there has to be clear unambiguous language and the people of these islands are entitled to clear, unambiguous language."