The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, is studying the controversial file on the sale of passports to the Mahfouz family which led to Mr Ray Burke's resignation as Minister for Foreign Affairs in October 1997.
A Department spokesman confirmed that Mr McDowell requested the file late last week, and was reading it closely over the last few days.
However, the spokesman said he was not yet in a position to say whether the Minister agreed with the Taoiseach's assessment that there was nothing in the file to cause concern.
Mr Ahern was shown the file by the outgoing Minister for Justice, Ms Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, on the instructions of Mr Albert Reynolds in 1994. He said last week that the file "did not raise any alarm bells".
Mr Ahern is not due to be questioned on his assessment of the file during a debate in the Dáil on the Flood tribunal this week as direct questioning has been ruled out by the Government Whip.
The file shows that almost £20 million in investments was promised by Mr Mahfouz, a Saudi sheik, in return for 11 passports he received from Mr Burke in December 1990, eight for himself and family members and three for Pakistani nationals.
Mr Burke signed the naturalisation certificates at his home in Swords on December 8th, 1990, at the request of the then Taoiseach, Mr Charles Haughey, but after the passports were issued by the Department of Foreign Affairs. This was a reversal of normal procedures.
Mr Mahfouz was a Saudi banker who pledged the £20 million sterling investment in a letter to the Department of Justice on the day the passports were issued, December 7th, 1990. This in itself was unusual since the Government generally required that the investment should be in situ before the passports were given.
The inquiry initiated by Ms Geoghegan-Quinn found that the speed with which the passports were issued was highly unusual.
In 1998 the Government published a summary of a review of the scheme which indicated that there had been a number of breaches of the guidelines intended to be used for the operation of the scheme since it started in 1989.
The Minister for Justice at that time, Mr John O'Donoghue, told the Dáil that "by and large, the main elements of the statement of intent were complied with".
Last week, Mr Ahern said that alarm bells did not ring on Mr Burke despite the fact he received warnings from Mr Reynolds that Mr Burke could be corrupt.
"Mr Reynolds made me aware of a file and Máire Geoghegan- Quinn gave it to me. The information was passed on to the tribunals and investigated," he said.
A spokeswoman for the Taoiseach said last night that Mr Ahern had no further comment to make on the passport issue and on a claim in a Sunday paper that half of the £20 million investment which was pledged remained unaccounted for.