(Bloomberg) —President Donald Trump expects Puerto Rico’s $74 billion debt to be addressed through the bankruptcy process established under a law passed last year, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, not eliminated, as he suggested in a television interview.

“There’s a process for how to deal with Puerto Rico’s debt. It will have to go through that process to have a lasting recovery and growth. This is a process that was put in place and set up under Obama,” Sanders told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “The president wants it to go through that process, and that’s the stage we’re at on that.”

Her remark appeared to clarify Trump’s intentions toward the territory’s debt after he rattled the $3.8 trillion municipal bond market on Tuesday with an interview suggesting he wanted the debt eliminated.

“We have to look at their whole debt structure,” Trump said in a Fox News interview. “They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street. We’re going to have to wipe that out. That’s going to have to be — you know, you can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that.”

White House officials soon sought to walk back the statement. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, said Wednesday morning — as Puerto Rico’s bond prices sunk to a record low, 32 cents on the dollar — not to take Trump literally.

“I think what you heard the president say is that Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to solve its debt problem,” Mulvaney said.

The island began a bankruptcy-like proceeding in May to restructure its debt, the largest such process in this history of the U.S. municipal bond market. The island’s debt service payments have been on hold while it restructures its obligations in court.

Even before the storm, Puerto Rico said it could only pay a fraction of what it owed its creditors. The island’s fiscal plan, approved by the federally appointed oversight board with broad control over the commonwealth’s finances, allocated an average of about $800 million annually to bondholders over the next decade of the more than $3 billion it owed each year.

Hurricane Maria’s devastation of the island casts doubt that it will be able to afford the payments in the near term given government funds will likely be spent on the recovery. Tax collection has also been disrupted, local officials say.